Digital Plunge - have you already taken the plunge?

I recently finished a book named 'Digital Strategy' by Alexander Rauser. Alexander has given current day problems during any Digital transformation and pragmatic solutions for that. Having worked in the IT industry for 17 years and last 10 years mostly into Digital Transformations for most of the fortune 500 companies, it was quite relevant to me. If you are also part of any digital transformation of any organization in any capacity, you will find it helpful too. Over the last decade, companies have thought of digital strategy as a means to market new technology or recognize upcoming trends. However, today few of those companies do realize that Digital Strategy is all about continuously improving your business to stay ahead in the curve, but some are still stuck in the old mindset. It's surprising to see  'Strategy' is missing from the Digital Strategy for many of the transformations happening, rather the focus is just on 'Marketing' (Digital Marketing...

Users are contributing content more than ever before, and it's getting difficult for Enterprise systems to manage it. To cope up with this, Adobe keeps evolving their UGC ecosystem. I think it was called  Social Collaboration tool  before CQ 5.5 After CQ 5.5 it was called  Social Communities  (So-Co),  this was shortened to So-Co. With AEM 6, this was rebranded as AEM Communities. At that point, all UGC components functionality was moved into Communities from AEM. So forums, comments/ratings etc. With 6.2, the concept of a central store was introduced, so content was saved outside of AEM in a central location where all instances would read and write, this can be Mongo, or JCR (but only for single instances) or it can be cloud storage (better name than social storage) which as you know carries a cost. And then Adobe overtook another product named Livefyre which is managed comments and other UGC ...

Recently I worked on one of the major enterprise project in Adobe for upgrading AEM from 5.6.1 to 6.2. It took me and my team almost 10 months to upgrade this enterprise system, due to the complexity of the project. After working on multiple upgrade projects on AEM now, I feel that even though Adobe documentation does provide lots of help, but there is still a huge difference in plan, timelines (may vary from 4 weeks to 10 months), and execution for each project (completely depends on the current architecture and topologies). I am trying to consolidate my experience and learnings on these projects in my blog. Hope it will be helpful for some of you planning for AEM upgrade I will cover each phase separately as below Kickoff, Planning & estimation Analysis/assessment/discovery workshop Actual upgradation   Post upgrade Activities Performance tuning activities Go live & Cutover Maintenance activities

There are many situations when you need to compare two AEM instances. The easiest approach is to compare packages, bundles and configurations. Here is how you can do it - Compare package managers  http://localhost:4502/crx/packmgr/service.jsp?cmd=ls Compare Bundles  http://localhost:4502/system/console/bundles.json Compare Configurations  http://localhost:4502/system/console/status-Configurations Compare system properties  http://localhost:4502/system/console/status-System%20Properties You can then compare these manually using any text comparers. Another quicker approach is to compare those using below tools by Aemstuff.com - http://www.aemstuff.com/tools/cti.html http://www.aemstuff.com/tools/coi.html

Many of my friends keep asking me to provide some interview questions related with SDL Tridion . Surprisingly, there are hardly any site available for questions related with SDL Tridion., though you can find host of sites for other WCMs like AEM and Sitecore. Hence, I thought to put some basic Tridion related questions on the basis of my experience with it. I know it may require several improvements but thought to share something for someone who is looking to get some Tridion related questions to start with. I will be glad to incorporate any suggestion you have. Development phases related questions - What is the development methodology recommended by SDL for development/integration based on SDL Tridion? Have you participated in any Blueprinting workshop, please share the experience? What are the inputs required in BluePrint? How can inheritance of content flow be altered explicitly? What are priority and ranking in Blueprint? What are the inputs required for Content Modeling ...

Alvin Toffler, renowned American author, known also for his works discussing the "Digital revolution" once said " The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. " Hello, At outset of my career I chose not to be modern illiterate :) hence I keep learning aggressively whenever I get chance, keep unlearning what is not relevant and keep relearning stuffs whenever required . With learning as a prominent goal in mind, I had a hectic but really productive learning weekends recently. It started with two days' workshop (24-25th July) on "High Impact Presentation" by Dale Carnegie Training conducted by Mindtree. Then two days' workshop (8-9th August) on "Extreme Programming Conference" by industry experts again conducted by Mindtree and finally attended "Judges Training Program" on 10th August conducted by Toastmasters International. Out of...

Large portion of a developer work in any Web content management tool is to display content. Here are the three ways to do so in AEM/CQ5 - 1. Through Properties Object - The properties object is an instance of the ValueMap class and contains all properties of the current resource. For example - properties.get("jcr:title") 2. Through Current Page Object – The currentPage object is an instance of the Page class, which provides some methods to access content. For example - currentPage.getTitle() 3. Through Current Node Object – The currentNode object is an instance of the Node which provides access to content via the getProperty() method. For example - currentNode.getProperty("jcr:title").getString() Here is the complete code snippet for trying all these three options Let’s test this script by requesting a page in Site Admin that implements this “Page component”. Thank you!

  I found some stark differences of working style in both the regions’ people. Most of the Indian IT companies are trying to consolidate their position in Europe after a level of saturation in US, UK, Australia and other English speaking countries, and probably most of them are struggling in Europe, though they executed projects for English speaking countries. Most of the projects including Digital Transformations even I got to chance to work on in my career were for US based customers. However, recently I got chance to work with some European giants. I thought to share my learnings & experiences after directly working with some of the big European accounts. Communication barrier - As I pointed above, Indian IT companies succeeded for most part in English speaking countries, in executing the project to completion. One of the prominent reason I think is since English is sort of primary language for all Indian companies. However, for most of the European countries English is ...

  Cloud Platforms are getting stronger and humongous day by day. The two prominent cloud platforms that I got chance to work with and arguably the Market leaders - Microsoft with its Azure Cloud and Amazon with its Amazon Web Services (AWS), has a long list of services now offered through Cloud Platform. You can build Infrastructure, develop Web Apps & Mobile Apps, manage identity and access, do analytics, Internet of things, Database, IDEs and what not. As a Digital Architect, I recently got chance to evaluate various offerings by cloud platform vendors and to recommend best ones as a part of Digital transformation being done for a customer. Following is what I went with and it looked to be a reasonable recommendations - Infrastructure requirements – We opted for Azure VMs & Active Directory for managing servers. Every Digital WCM needs good amount of server resources, at the least 8 servers – Author and Publish instance for each DTAP (Dev, Test, Acceptance & Prod)...

Campaign management provides digital marketers the opportunity to create dedicated experiences for visitors.   We can create content, segment visitors, push and promote targeted content for specific user profiles and manage campaigns across multiple channels. Elements in Campaign Management :- Brands: Brands are the top level unit and form a collection of Campaigns. Campaigns: A campaign is a collection of individual Experiences. Teasers: Teaser Pages / Paragraphs are used to steer specific visitor . Typically a teaser page is a temporary action that will last for a specific period of time, until it is replaced by the next teaser page. Newsletters: E-mail Communications are used to engage users and encourage them to visit your web site. These usually take the form of a newsletter, sent to Leads (which are usually grouped into Lists) Leads: The information that you have collected about your visitors and how to contact them forms the basis for your leads. Lists:Leads are u...

I found that there are not many resources for Adobe CQ5, eventhough it is a market leader of WCM. So, I plan to take baby steps to post all the knowledge I have about Adobe CQ5 through this blog. Thank You for visiting!!