Web Experience Management Solution for Alfresco 4 with Crafter
1. Crafter Rivet
The WEM Solution for Alfresco 4
Alfresco Webinar – 12 April 2012
Russ Danner, WEM Practice Director
Rivet Logic Corporation
11410 Isaac Newton Square N.
Suite 210
Reston, VA 20190
Ph: 703.955.3480 Fax: 703.234.7711
ARTISANS OF OPEN SOURCE
3. Alfresco is now the largest open source
content management company in the world.
Founded in 2005, with offices in London & Atlanta
Over 3 million community downloads
250+ global channel partners
2,500 customers in 55 countries, including…
ARTISANS OF OPEN SOURCE
4. Document Management
Capture, share & retain corporate
The content, including documents, video, images &
graphics files
Alfresco Records Management
Platform Ensure governance, compliance and retention
of company or government records
Web Content Services
Author, collaborate & publish to
Drupal, Liferay, JBoss Portal or your custom
web app
Enterprise Collaboration
Create, share, collaborate, iterate & discuss
content. Then publish to social channels.
Open Source Platform
Build content-rich apps and websites using
RESTful APIs or Java & open standards like
CMIS & JSR 168
ARTISANS OF OPEN SOURCE
First let me take a brief moment to introduce Rivet LogicWe are a professional services firm focused on building solutions for Web experience management, content management, social collaboration and community applications using open source software. We focus on what we consider to be the best of breed open source platforms in this space such as Alfresco for content management, Liferay for portals, and Apache Solr for enterprise search.
Today we live and operate in a multi-channel consumer reality, or what Forrester calls the age of experience, which represents a fundamental shift in how enterprises in general, and marketers in particular, interact with customers. And this is driven by three major trends …
The first is social. The web is becoming increasingly more social and much less anonymous. Today’s web is all about building relationships, and sharing experiences.
The second trend is Local. While the internet is continuously expanding in terms of ubiquity, at the same time, it is becoming much more local and much more personal in terms of user experience. While the world may be getting smaller with the help of connectivity, our local experience is growing larger.
And the third trend is Mobile. Mobile includes traditional cell or feature phones, smart phones and tablets. Mobile access to the internet is simply exploding. Gartner predicts that before 2014 mobile based browsing will overtake traditional desktop consumption of the internet.
Obviously the landscape is evolving quickly. Many organizations who can clearly see the need and opportunity right in front of them find themselves wondering how do I get started. So let’s talk about how to get there and what a few of the best practices are that we need to keep in mind along the way.
The first thing you need to do is take a step back and and get the right set of questions on the table. It’s your business strategy and goals should drive what and how you are communicating and engaging with your market. This in turn should drive your content strategy. So take the time to check the numbers and ask the so called “obvious questions.”We see many times that clients will jump straight into a technology selection without really considering the key business drivers. Your biggest wins will come from unexpected insights at this stage in your project.
Once you’ve got your strategy in place and you know where you are headed you can align and prioritize the technology with your business, content and engagement strategy.This is where content management comes in. Content management is about enabling your team to collaborate and focus their time, creativity and effort on the content rather than the tools or the process. Content management is about making the team efficient by streamlining and removing organizational dependencies and bottlenecks. Therefore content management tools need to be configurable in order to map to your business and above all they need to be easy to use by non technical users.
Content is the fodder of our discussion and engagement. Once we’ve enabled the right people within the organization to efficiently create and manage content we can turn our attention to where the rubber meets the road; the discussion and engagement around the content.Your team is small, by comparison, the world is large, diverse and the channels are many. In the era of engagement you will need to be able to meet and engage with your customers, personally, in their language, on their device, and on and around their schedule. Web experience management provides you with the tool set to take on this otherwise daunting task.The capabilities of web experience management allow you to create, manage, and deliver dynamic, targeted and consistent content/offers/products across various online channels including your website, social media, marketing campaign sites, mobile applications, and more. Now I won’t drill into all of these in detail. Some enterprises need some of these more than others -- Remember, it’s your analysis that will drive what pieces you need and where to focus your attention first.A few key capabilities that are important on today’s playing field are:Social and personal publishing with round trip analytics. Publishing to social channels like Facebook and Twitter and to personal channels like Email and SMS are of ever growing importance. Just as important as getting the message out is the need to be able to capture feedback and measure and react to the effectiveness of your communication.Targeting and personalization: Users are on-line more often but in shorter bursts than ever before. You need to speak to them directly, shot gun messaging is easily ignored in a ocean of content. Content targeting and personalization are the key ingredients to initiating and holding meaningful conversations. Responsive Design: As the tables turn towards an internet dominated by mobile browsing we need web properties that can respond properly for specific devices. In general, we need systems that allow us to publish the same content through more than one template. The system should be able to automatically apply the proper template for a given channel or device.
Now that we have a conceptual framework for web experience management in place, lets look at some examples how you can achieve effective Multi Channel WEM.At Rivet Logic, we believe open architectures and open source are some of the best candidates to consider. Rivet Logic has created Crafter Rivet, a 100% open source Web Experience Management platform built on top of Alfresco 4.0, which is the leading open platform for content management.
Crafter Rivet is a full featured platform which allows you to create, manage and publish your content to all of your channels and to measure and improve the effectiveness of your reach.
Crafter Rivet was started in 2007 as a delivery tier for Alfresco powered websites. This delivery component is now called Crafter Engine.Crafter Studio was started in 2009 to provide an intuitive, easy to use interface for content management on top of alfresco and our first production release was performed in 2010.Throughout 2010 and 2011 we have been upgrading and improving Crafter Studio and Crafter Engine to work with the latest versions of Alfresco and to include powerful features for both web content management and web experience management.In April of 2012 we released Crafter Rivet version 2 which enables Crafter Rivet to run on top of Alfresco 4.0. Alfresco 4 is important and momentous release for Alfresco that has taken a extremely powerful system and improved on it many fold. We are extremely excited about this release and the capabilities and the foundation that we have with Alfresco.
Let’s get a little more technical and cover some of the architectural details of Crafter Rivet.
Crafter Rivet uses a decoupled architecture. Management and Delivery are done on separate systems. Content and experience and managed until ready and approved and then are deployed to a separate, dedicated delivery infrastructure.
This approach allows us to right size infrastructure for the audience it is serving and on the publishing side, to handle any number of deployment options from websites running on Crafter Rivet in spring, Ruby, Seam and many others. We can also publish to your existing infrastructure, social networks and mobile endpoints.
Now let’s take a look at some of the key components of the system. For our first component let’s look at the foundation of our management system, the Alfresco Repository. Crafter Studio, the authoring and management application in Crafter Rivet connects to the Alfresco repository via Rest. The repository provides the storage and all of the content services, workflow and deployment subsystems. Content is stored and managed in the core repository which allows us to leverage all of the modeling, rules framework, extraction, metadata and other advanced features of Alfresco.
Now before we move on, I’d like to address the use of the Alfresco repository for existing WCM customers. In early February of this year, Alfresco’s community manager Jeff Potts, sent out an important notice via blog to existing Alfresco WCM customers stating that the AVM repository and user interface which powered Alfresco’s WCM solutions prior to Alfresco 4 was being discontinued.
Prior to Alfresco 4, Alfresco actually contained two repositories, the original repository, often called the core repository and the AVM, a repository specifically built to handle a number of WCM use cases.
Service integrators typically implemented document management, record management and collaboration engagements in the core repository because of it’s strong features for supporting these types of use cases
And web content management in the AVM because of the features it provided specifically for supporting WCM use cases.
The most important features were a dynamic webforms for content capture, it’s remote file deployment capability and it’s versioning model which enabled you to know the exact state of your website at any given moment in time.
The AVM and its user interface also supported a number of less mission critical features for WCM such as preview server, sandboxes, and the ability to take snapshots of a particular version.
However, the core repository has always maintained an impressive list of features that were never made available to the AVM based solution for a variety of reasons.
In order to simplify their offering and to capture the value of the core repository Alfresco, over the last year and a half, has developed all of the mission critical functionality required for WCM use cases on top of the core repository
And the remaining features can be implemented based on the existing core repository feature set and APIs
As a result Alfresco 4’s core repository is now the single solution for storing, managing and publishing your all of the content for your enterprise regardless of what type it is.
For existing customers using the AVM based WCM solution on versions 2 and 3; you will be supported by Alfresco until your version of Alfresco reaches end of Life but it’s important to note that Alfresco will not support the AVM in Alfresco 5. What this means is that you should begin planning and executing your migration to Alfresco 4 and a core repository solution as soon as possible. Crafter Rivet is a perfect solution for a migration, like the AVM, Crafter Rivet uses XML to capture the model for your website. What this means is that you can port you existing web projects in to Crafter Rivet. Rivet Logic also has the tools and experience to help you make this transition as seamless as possible.
Now to move on, lets look at our second component which is Crafter Studio, the management application that sits on top of the Alfresco 4 repository
Once you have the system installed you’ll want to get up and going with a website quickly. Crafter Studio allows you to do this with a feature we call website blueprints. Blueprints are the ability to create a new website based on an existing website template. Blueprints get you up and going with a website in minutes!
Crafter Studio supports workflow. The system allows you to see workflow state through your dashboards. Under the hood, publishing workflow is managed by Activiti, a standards based, advanced workflow engine and workflow management capability in Alfresco. As we’ll see in the demo the user interface is clean, simple and provides a complete picture of how your content is flowing through your publishing process and deployment.
Crafter Studio supports both in-context edit and rich, form based editing. The system leverages Orbeon, open source’s leading, standards based XForms engine to provide a forms capability that is powerful enough to meet any use case.
Crafter Rivet has powerful publishing capabilities. Content is published through Alfresco’s new Channel API which allow you to deploy your site to multiple channels.
Once you’ve published your content you want to monitor it’s performance and make adjustments to ensure it’s reaching its highest potential. Crafter Studio provides out of the box integration with Google Analytics and a ability to create your own reports. You can also plug-in other analytic data sources through our API
Finally let’s discuss the delivery component of Crafter Rivet, we call Crafter Engine
Crafter Engine is a Spring framework based application that has been constructed with a service oriented architecture. At the heart of Crafter engine is middleware services that consume and process the XML published by Alfresco and present it through services and templates for presentation. Make use of our Freemarker and Spring MVC based presentation layer or plug in your own. We’ve integrated many presentation frameworks on customer engagements such as jruby, seam, cold fusion, php and many others.
Crafter Engine understands what kind of devices are making a requests to it and can make use of device specific templates to create a targeted user experience for a given device.
* Log in to ShareShow sites, go to acme Explain dashboard in brief Go to preivew for home page Show multi-channel templates by looking at homepage in iPhone ICP, and Simulator Create page-- Paste from word-- Style with layout-- Insert images and format-- Look at page in channel-- Add facebook summary-- preview site-- Preview site as iPhone-- Make edit with ice -- refesh-- Look at metrics
