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.  

So I came across this link in Google:  TWITTER BOOTSTRAP FOR ADOBE CQ5.5.  I had no idea what a Twitter Bootstrap was, so off to the research mission!

Twitter Bootstrap is described by the developers as “Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions.”  That sounded interesting, so I dug further.  Bootstrap is based on HTML5, CSS3, a 12-column grid, some jQuery plug-ins to create a framework for building a fully responsive, run on any browser website.  What really caught my eye was that Bootstrap was built by and for nerds.

Bootstrap sounded pretty interesting, so I continued my research mission.  Next I found out that Bootstrap was the most watched project on GitHub back in March.  It is still generating lots of interest.  Its also Open Source, so anybody can participate in building out Bootstrap.  If you want to see samples of sites built using Bootstrap, you can see some on Tumblr or go to the Bootstrap page.

Back to Adobe CQ 5.5. So what does Bootstrap do for Adobe CQ 5.5?  Well officially nothing.  Adobe is not building Bootstrap sites with CQ 5.5.  But, a company called Headwire has built an integration for CQ .5.5 to use Bootstrap for the page framework.  So using the Bootstrap framework and CQ 5.5, you can easily build sites that use responsive design techniques, are instantly browser compatible, and can take advantage of jQuery, slideshows, tabs, button bars, etc.  Headwire also includes a drag and drop editor to create templates based on Bootstrap.  By creating templates you can allow your authors to fill in the templates without having to understand all that HTML and responsive stuff.

Yes, you can build these features into CQ 5.5 yourself, but why?  It seems to me that Bootstrap is a great standalone product, but when combined with Adobe CQ 5.5, you have an even better experience.

• Adobe CQ5.5 Sneak Peek
• Adobe CQ5.5 Now Available

At the time of the announcement, Adobe also announced CQ 5.5 Social Communities, but had not yet shipped that feature.  Well, I missed the original shipping announcement, so I’m catching up to it now.

On May 15, 2012, Adobe announced that CQ 5.5 Social Communities was available.  Social Communities builds on to some existing features already available in Adobe CQ 5.5, such as “developing and managing blogs, forums, comments, and ratings, as well as connecting to social networks, across all aspects of an organization’s digital presence”.

You can now include login to CQ 5 using Twitter or Facebook and then personalize their experience using information from their profile or data from other systems.  Adobe has included several social plugins in CQ 5.5 that include:Activity feeds

• “Like” buttons
• Comments
• Twitter Share
• Twitter Follow
• Twitter Search

These new features will make it even easier for site managers to add social capabilities to their websites.

You can see a video of some of the social plugins on YouTube or inline below.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DVlaN_zcs0[/youtube]

• Insight for analyzing large volumes of data in real-time
• Scene7 for converting rich media to dynamic content optimized across channels
• Search&Promote for targeted site search and surfacing relevant product and content matches
• SiteCatalyst for actionable online analytics
• Test&Target for website optimization and personalization

CQ5.5 also introduces new e-commerce capabilities using an open framework and partnership with hybris.

Four big and important new capabilities for Adobe CQ5.5 are, according to Adobe’s press release:

• Client Context—Deliver contextualized content and consistent brand experiences as customers move from channel-to-channel and device-to-device. Harnessing rich profile, segmentation and analytics data from the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, Client Context empowers digital marketers to create, preview and optimize the personalized experience of target customer audiences.
• Mobile App Development—Empower marketing to rapidly create HTML5-based mobile apps through new integration with PhoneGap, Adobe’s standards-based framework for building cross-platform apps. Intuitive, drag-and-drop functionality takes full advantage of device features, such as the accelerometer, camera and GPS.
• DAM—Enable collaboration on rich media assets, including video, beyond the borders of the organization. Marketers can easily find, share, add comments to, and revise and publish assets regardless of format, speeding time to market on digital campaigns. Now includes integration with Adobe Creative Suite® tools, as well as Adobe Creative Cloud, which is expected in the first half of 2012.
• Cloud Manager (beta)—Ensure optimal performance during peak customer demand by eliminating bottlenecks and accelerating time-to-market on new campaigns. New cloud service enables marketers to take control of fluctuating peak customer traffic while minimizing turnaround time of key online initiatives.

This new version is a great improvement over the already outstanding CQ5 platform.  I think the Client Context features are extremely exciting as it brings the power of personalizing a web site to the non-technical user in a tremendous way.

I’m also excited about the new integrations in the Digital Asset Management tools.  This should make collaboration between the creative people and the web managers even more seamless.

Gartner sees many vendors, such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle expanding more and more into the Suite side of the market.  There are also emerging vendors in Suite side, including Adobe and Cisco.  On the lean side, we see vendors such as Liferay, Backbase, Drupal and DotNetNuke.

One of the key points I got out of Gene’s talk is to understand the ethos, or character, of the various vendor products.  Gene offers the following ethos for each vendor.

• Vendor -> Ethos
• Adobe -> Customer
• Cisco -> Collaboration
• IBM -> Customer; Employee
• Oracle -> Business Apps/Process
• MS -> Collaboration
• SAP -> Business Apps/Process

The ethos doesn’t mean that a vendor can’t play in another space, but it may be more challenging.

Gene offers the follow strategies to address UXP in the future:

• Take inventory of portal and portal-like technologies and efforts in your enterprise
• Establish governance early, including processes, teams and executive sponsorship
• Improve design processes as precursor to UXP adoption
• Gather Feedback from stakeholders
• Capitalize on widget and gadget integration via RESTful approaches
• Plan for an onslaught of mobile requirements
• Verify Alignment with Portal Vendor strategies
• Devise a framework and establish standards to address ongoing portal and UXP initiatives.
• Look at new sourcing strategies: buy  vs build vs hosting vs cloud

I asked about how Web Content Management vendors play in the UXP arena.  Gene responded that Personalization is really at the heart of a UXP.  Personalization is something portals do very well.  If you have a content management system that also does a good job of personalization, then that could be the basis of an excellent UXP platform.  See Adobe for an excellent example.  He thinks, and I agree, that we will see Web Content Management vendors becoming players in the UXP market.