First, DAM in Adobe is now called Adobe Experience Manager Assets.

Managing digital assets can be a tedious process and the time lag involved delays web site launch. Too often assets are not integrated into social media channels consistently.

Assets range from the Creative Cloud to the Marketing Cloud, so from creating assets to managing and sharing assets to multichannel delivery.

How can we shorten the time to delivery? In the Marketing Cloud, we now have Projects that allows us to manage the life cycle of a project. Inside the Project there is a dashboard that shows the assets, tasks, people, experiences, brand guidelines and workflows associated with the project.

AEM and Marketing Cloud are now connected so assets in AEM are available in both places. Since Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud are connected, you share assets among AEM, Marketing and Creative Clouds.

Within the asset system, you can now collaborate right from within the asset. This includes annotating video, images and addressing other users in the comment. The annotation notice will take the user directly to the spot in the video where the comment is located.

The workflow process integrates directly with the asset. So while looking at the asset, you can see the workflow. The workflow also shows up in the project dashboard. In the review process, the system will collect the images associated with the project – a photo shoot for example – and you can approve all of the images at one time.

When it comes time to build the experience, the system can create different renditions, including a 360 degree view. You can assign a category to an asset and then rollout the images to your product catalog. If this is a commerce site, the images are then available right on the site.

What about reusing images in social media sites? You don’t want to just send them over to the social team without being able to continue to manage the assets. When assets are shared with the Marketing Cloud, they are available beyond AEM.

Within Adobe Social, there is a Publisher tool that can publish content to Facebook. Hopefully you have guessed that Publisher integrates with Marketing Cloud and can use assets right from there. Unfortunately, those assets get uploaded to Facebook, so they still have to be managed through Publisher.

Here are the presenter’s top 5 new features in Adobe Experience Manager 6:
– Creative and Marketing Cloud connection
– dynamic imaging or automatic renditions
– advanced video that works across devices
– meta data and search
– task and workflow management

WebSphere Portal Active Site Analytics (ASA) framework is used to integrate third party analytics tools which  analyze web site visitor demographics and interaction patterns. ASA is built-in to WebSphere Portal, making it easy for you to integrate one of the many analytic tools into the overall experience.

Portal does not provide the analytics engine – that is provided by systems such as CoreMetrics, WebTrends, Unica and Adobe SiteCatalyst.  Portal ships with tag aggregators for CoreMetrics and Unica.  It also includes a generic aggregator that can be updated easily for other vendors.  These aggregators pull the analytic data from the page and sends it to one of the analytic systems.  You can add your own tags to a page to provide even more insights into the user behavior.

The analytics systems are used to generate reports and analysis that marketers and business users can review.  To make it very easy to view the analytics reports and charts, Portal provides a mechanism to view those reports directly on the page and in context of the various items on the page.  So you can go to a specific content area on the page and directly view the analytics report/chart for that content. This is shown in the picture below.

Thomas showed several IBM Digital Marketing Optimization solution examples and also covered how to use ASA to:

• integrate third party web analytics aggregator scripts to web portal and content pages
• collect real-time data for analysis
• out-of-box reporting
• campaign management options

New in WebSphere Portal 8 are even better inline marketing overlays, which provide business and marketing people direct, real-time views of sub-page level data, including portlets, and content items.  These overlays make it easy to see user behavior for analysis and then use this information to drive results.

The important point for us is that site analytics is no longer just reports on how many people hit our site and what pages were viewed most.  Active Site Analytics has now evolved into accessing real-time insights into the usage patterns of your Web Experience platform.  Once you capture usage data you can then optimize delivery of your marketing messages to your audiences through multiple channels,  enhanced by high capability campaign management systems, such as the IBM Marketing Center.  

The jump from CQ4 to CQ5 brought a considerable improvement in the product, wrapped with an elitist bow – aiming to enchant not only techie geeks, but marketers as well. Since then, Day overhauled its upper management echelons, kept up an aggressive research and product development schedule, expanded sales and marketing activities globally and, particularly, in North America, prettied up enough to get acquired by Adobe. Result? The product is now officially popular.

– RealStory Group, “CQ5 WCM development skills are hot — and scarce“

Adobe is a leader in Web Content Management, and CQ5 is a robust content management system. It integrates “multi-channel marketing planning, a social module for building communities and online forums and a targeting module that builds Ominture tools into CQ5 and enables marketers to better understand which campaigns are working and to target specific content,” according to Fierce Content Management.

Perficient is looking for CQ5 Web Content Management developers to develop, design, test and deploy WCM solutions and next generation web content management systems (WCMS) for our clients. You will work closely with clients, developers, system administrators, project managers, business analysts and end users to build a state-of-the-art WCMS systems and solutions. Learn more about the opportunity here.

In addition, while the JSR 286 spec has been out since 2008, it took the Portal vendors some time to update their Portal Servers to support the new standard.  Now all the major vendors support JSR 286 on their Portal server.  Even many content management systems are supporting JSR 286 portlets on their systems.

Also known as Portlet 2.0, JSR 286 builds upon the first portlet standard, JSR 168, so it has all the features of the first standard plus more:

• Event handling
• Shared parameters
• Resource addressing
• Alignment with WSRP 2.0

If you want a really in depth discussion of these new features, take a look at this article on developerWorks: What’s new in the Java Portlet Specification V2.0 (JSR 286)?  It’s been three years since the JSR 286 spec came out, so its hardly new.

So when should you code to JSR 286 or when should you code to JSR 168?  Here are my thoughts:

• If you are using the latest version of a mainstream portal, code to JSR 286.  Liferay 6, WebSphere Portal 7, Oracle WebCenter 11.1.1.14, JBoss, Adobe CQ5, OpenText, Apache all support JSR 286.
• If you aren’t sure what spec your portal server supports, code to JSR 168.  If you have older versions of Liferay (prior to V5), WebSphere Portal (prior to V6), Oracle WebCenter (prior to v11), you don’t have a choice – JSR 168 is the only supported spec.
• Your development environment may dictate whether you use JSR 286 or not.  In IBM’s Rational Developer, for example, it can’t create a JSR 286 portlet using Struts.  You can build a JSR 168 portlet using Struts, though.

So my bottom line is this: code to the JSR 286 standard when you can and only use JSR 168 when forced to.