Archive for 2012

    Content Management and Content Experience

    December 11, 2012 1:44 PM

    I find that when organizations implement a digital strategy, it often lacks (what I believe is) a critical distinction between “content management” and “content experience.” Usually a primary purpose of digital strategy is to distribute content directly to those who will find it most relevant. When the content reaches someone who finds it immediately relevant, passive content consumption turns into engagement. Ultimately, the goal is to turn that engagement into some kind of conversion that correlates with a facet of the content distributor’s overall strategy. In other words: good content, delivered to the right people will help you sell whatever it is you want to sell.

    posted by Ryan Lunka

    Adobe CQ5 Update 2

    October 8, 2012 8:25 PM

    Adobe has released Update 2 for Adobe CQ5.5. Release notes. Additional support has beeb added for Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8; and improved Support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and 9

    posted by Christian Vozar

    Maximizing the Value of Your WCM Implementation

    September 14, 2012 7:46 PM

    “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Everyone on the planet has heard this Chinese proverb in some form. I believe it to be the fundamental philosophy behind the concept of a web content management system. WCM is about empowerment. It’s about enabling the experts in communication to optimize how they use the web as a platform for that communication. It’s about getting the technology out of their way without taking it away. It’s about enabling (buzzword alert) communication agility.

    posted by Ryan Lunka

    CQ5 Groovy Console 2.0.0 Released!

    September 13, 2012 4:00 PM

    It's been over a year since the initial release of the CQ5 Groovy Console, and we've since added a significant number of new features and enhancements to improve the usability of the tool. Version 2.0.0 was released this week; some highlights are listed below:

    posted by Mark Daugherty

    LESS CSS in Adobe CQ 5.5

    August 30, 2012 8:59 PM

    What is it? If you blinked you might have missed it in the release notes but Adobe CQ 5.5 supports including LESS files along with your CSS in ClientLibs. If you are not familiar with LESS, it basically makes stylesheets more powerful by adding programming language-like features such as variables, functions, mixins, etc. It is very similar to Sass or Stylus if you have ever used those.

    posted by Bryan Williams

    Empower the Author to Manage the Content Domain

    August 22, 2012 5:53 PM

    There are hundreds of different content management systems out there, all claiming to be the best, fastest, coolest, whatever.  I’ve worked with a few different ones, including some crazy homegrown systems, but most of my experience is with Adobe CQ5.  If you are interested in the big wide content management world, I recommend trying to get your hands on CQ5.  The fundamental architecture (Apache Sling, Adobe CRX) is really fun and really powerful.

    posted by Ryan Lunka

    Introducing Amazon Glacier

    August 21, 2012 8:56 PM

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced a new feature today that takes aim at backup solutions and other types of cold storage.   With Amazon Glacier, you can store data at costs as low as $0.01 per gigabyte per month ($0.011 to store in California/Ireland and $0.012 to store in Tokyo).  You can store a little or you can store tons since you only pay for what you use – no capacity planning needed here.  On the backend, Glacier will perform integrity checks of your data and the service is said to provide an average annual durability of 99.999999999% (that’s nine 9’s).  

    posted by Michael Kang

    Semantic Sling Part II - Turtle Soup

    July 2, 2012 12:14 AM

    In the first post of the series I have since affectionately titled "Semantic Sling," I took a rather hypothetical look at serving Linked-Data out of the Sling server and whether Sling and JCR exposed any functionality which facilitated such service. This analysis took the form of a mapping between the tenets of Linked-Data and the capabilities inherent to Sling and JCR. Of all the tenets, number three was underserved by both directly, though I did indicate that functionality present in both could be built upon.

    posted by Paul Michelotti

    Adobe CQ5.5 Update 1

    June 19, 2012 12:54 AM

    Adobe has recently released Update 1 for CQ5.5. The release notes can be found here.

    posted by Christian Vozar

    Cost Saving Benefits to the Cloud

    June 13, 2012 6:26 PM

    There was an article in InformationWeek recently, that discussed the cost benefits for companies utilizing the cloud. The article referenced not only savings from infrastructure costs but as well as operating costs. With the flexibility of the cloud, it is no longer necessary to fork over the costs for new servers. Instead, utilize the cloud to pay for what you use. Public cloud costs are on the decrease. Our partner, Amazon Web Services (AWS), lowered usage costs earlier this year. More specifically, managed hosting in the cloud can also reduce the operating costs by managing the servers for you and therefore freeing up IT staff to concentrate on other business projects. The article cites one in four CIOs are planning a project in the cloud this year in order to test the benefits and compare costs.  As cloud computing becomes more ubiquitous and corporate management begins to learn and explore cloud solutions it can often make sense to look for smaller projects or proof-of-concepts as a first foray into cloud hosting.

    posted by Molly McDaniel

    Zebra Technologies: Managing Massive Content and Assets

    May 25, 2012 11:16 PM

    Success Months of effort from both the CITYTECH team and our hard working friends at Zebra have paid off with a smooth CQ5 implementation. I find myself looking back and appreciating some of the innovation on this project.

    posted by Lance Dolan

    Bootstrapping Chef on Ubuntu 12 with Opscode Knife

    May 10, 2012 5:35 PM

    I enjoy using Opscode Chef since bringing up an automatically configured instance is fast and easy on any of our cloud providers.  Ubuntu 12 having just been released, I took the opportunity to perform QA testing on it as well as verify that our cookbooks would work as expected.  Using an Amazon EC2 published Ubuntu 12 AMI, I ran the "knife ec2 server create" command to create the instance and install our software.

    posted by Michael Chan

    Complex validation of CQ5 dialog fields using a custom Sling servlet

    April 16, 2012 4:12 AM

    Dialog fields in CQ5 occasionally require validation that cannot be handled with static constraints or regular expressions. However, this type of validation can be easily accomplished by delegating the validation function to a custom servlet. The implementation details and code samples below describe a viable solution for most validation scenarios.

    posted by Mark Daugherty

    Maintaining Visibility of CQ Editables

    April 10, 2012 4:43 PM

    Content elements such as multi-tab content controls and collapsible content sections are prevalent on modern websites.  In an Adobe CQ5 authoring environment, a common business requirement is to allow the authoring of such elements in place.  Such requirements necessitate the elements of the CQ authoring environment (edit bars, drop areas for paragraph systems, etc) to be hidden and shown as the content which they represent is hidden and shown.

    posted by Paul Michelotti

    Thoughts Concerning Serving Linked Data from Apache Sling

    April 2, 2012 2:13 PM

    Reviewing the JCR specification as well as some of the Apache Sling documentation, I caught a wiff of congruity between the functionality they exposed and the tenets of Linked Data as they are popularly defined in relation to the Semantic Web (listing 1). What struck me about this was that the congruity seemed inherent to JCR and Sling and was, from what I can tell, unintentional. Realization of this happy accident gave rise to the question of the ease with which Linked Data can be housed and served using Sling and JCR and the faculties built into each.

    posted by Paul Michelotti

    Adobe CQ5.5 and LDAP

    March 31, 2012 7:29 PM

    Adobe CQ 5.5 provides significant advancements for systems administrators including JMX support. One area of confusion for administrators is directory structure changes involved with CQ 5.5, specifically LDAP support. The information in this blog references the official Day/Adobe LDAP documentation. 

    posted by Christian Vozar

    Amazon Web Services and Latency Based Routing

    March 26, 2012 9:54 PM

    CITYTECH Managed Services clients who utilize Amazon Web Services DNS offering, Route 53, can benefit from extremely durable and cheap load-balancing between regions, including Europe and South America.

    posted by Christian Vozar

    Adobe CQ 5.5 & JMX

    March 16, 2012 8:39 PM

    Starting with CQ5.5, Adobe (Day) integrated one sorely missed functionality to the product, JMX. As with any J2EE server, JMX makes it easy to manage and monitor an application and services in real time. JMX allows for central management of managed beans or MBeans which act as wrapper for applications, components and resources. A standard MBean exposes attributes, properties and operations, which can be accessed for monitoring and invoked for certain conditions depending on underlying logic. It also helps when you don't need to restart the server to make a quick and essential change. With CQ taking prominence in today's digital media centric world, custom components are being built at a rapid pace to support and integrate several software products. Managing these custom components will become easy with JMX framework.

    posted by Puru Hemnani

    Keynote's Web Privacy Tracking

    February 24, 2012 8:12 PM

    Web privacy for users is becoming more of a priority for organizations. A detailed privacy policy instills trust with users. Users should be aware of how you intend to use the information gathered, whether it will be shared and how it will be stored. For organizations, a strong privacy policy is not always sufficient. Cookies from external sources are constantly being placed on your site. It is important to actively monitor and be aware of cookies placed on your site.

    posted by Molly McDaniel
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