Hippo CTO blog - Arjé Cahn

There has certainly been a lot of debate about Web Experience Management. Some analysts like Janus Boye have called it "meaningless vendor jargon". Some others like Scott Liewehr of Gilbane have said that understanding Web Engagement Management is "crucial to your business". Forrester has attempted to create its own definition – calling it "customer experience management". And, finally, others such as Julie Hunt – have written how Web Engagement Management even extends into the intranet of Enterprise 2.0 – and how content should be utilized to engage employees.

So here’s my take on it:

The trend in Web Content Management for the last couple of years has been Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - and it was all about getting your audience to your site. Period. Just make sure they find you. But then what? What happens once they get there? How do you keep them on your site? How do you make sure they come back later, how do you get them to start doing business on your site? How do you make your visitors fall in love with your site?

That’s Web Experience Management. It’s whatever comes after they’ve found you.

The trend is becoming clear. The web – and how we create, collaborate and consume content is becoming more personalized and contextual. It’s what makes people love your site. And, at Hippo we’re absolutely committed to helping our customers empower their audiences through contextualized web content experiences. We hope you’ll join us over the next year as these standards become reality.

We’re extraordinarily excited to be an instrumental part of a new technical committee as part of OASIS, the open standards consortium. OASIS has just announced that a new draft charter to establish the OASIS Web Experience Management Interoperability (WEMI) Technical Committee has been submitted. I’m very proud to say that Hippo is taking a leadership role with other member companies such as Adobe, Jahia, Liferay, Magnolia, Nuxeo, OpenText and SDL on this important committee.

In the charter – the idea of Web Experience Management is defined as an evolution of Web Content Management. Basically it says “where WCM provides the foundation for collaboration by offering users the ability to manage content, WEM emphasizes the importance of the delivery of the aggregated content into a total Web Experience."

Regardless of whether you think this is jargon, or just another word for “personalized" content – our belief is that developing standards for how this type of data can be made portable from tool to tool and how interoperability between different tools for content management, display, reporting, search indexing and meta data management all become an incredibly important factor for customers.

Our goal will be to agree on a simple domain model for WEM and, additionally, create an abstract set of standard features that would be commonly implemented by these types of tools. We will also be looking to identify future functionality that would be useful – but may not yet exist.

At Hippo we really believe that multi-channel content management is not enough. Through our continued work on the Apache Rave project – our new work on this WEMI standard – and our commitment to open standards and open source in general – Hippo is striving to make the Web a more contextual, personalized and empowering experience. As I said in the committee announcement:

“The ability to bring together different streams of information from disparate content systems using a standardized API is part of our vision for a more contextualized web experience. We intend to support WEMI in our Hippo CMS product line."

And, we hope you - our extended community - will join us in our effort.

The first meeting of the WEMI TC will be held on 16 Jan by teleconference, and a Call for Participation is currently open for OASIS members. If you want to join, please see the OASIS WEMI page.

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, if you didn’t know – here at Hippo we’re doing some incredibly cool stuff with the Apache Software Foundation. One of the new things that I’m excited about is Apache Rave, a project currently undergoing Incubation within Apache.

Apache Rave is a new Web and Social mashup engine. Right out of the box it will provide an extensible, lightweight Java platform to host, serve and aggregate Open Social Gadgets and services – all through a highly customizable friendly UI.

It's like a portal - but without the portal. Instead of heavy weight, expensive, server-side Java portlets, Rave is taking a more modern approach focusing on client side rendering of Gadgets and Widgets.

I like the Rave concept because it’s built and targeted to be an engine for web sites, intranet portals and social network channels. I believe that these things will eventually blend into one thing - and become the building blocks of every website. I see more and more demand for portal like behavior in websites - as well as social aspects and personalization. Intranets have traditionally been very behind the firewall, but the trend is to move more and more of the organization's internal apps to the cloud. At the same time, people start to understand that a business really is and has always been a true social network - and that a more social approach to intranets is the future. Rave brings all this together. And I'm thrilled to be part of it!

Mark my words: in 5 years time, every website will be personalized and socialized.

Continue reading "Raving about Rave!!" »

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dear reader,

Thank you so much for being part of the Hippo Community!

We want you to know that we value your feedback a lot - it's what makes our community such a great place to be :)

We'd love it if you'd use the following form to let us know how you think we're doing. If you have any thoughts on what we should improve to make your life as a Hippo developer easier, then please go ahead and put it in. Anything goes. No fields are required - just give us as much info as you like to. And...

... we're giving away 5 €20 ITunes Gift Cards amongst the first 50 fully completed forms!

Thanks for helping us build a kick-ass content management system!

Arjé Cahn,
CTO, Hippo

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m a big believer that when you’re developing software, that your team and the process you use is much more important than your specific choice of technology.  Our passion for developing community and teamwork is much more important than the applications we build.

And, we really strive to keep that community alive with our “extended team” (that’s you!) as well.  We want every single developer and architect that works on Hippo CMS to feel like they’re part of something really cool – and ultimately really important.

I really want to stress that with our latest set of releases – including 7.5 and our newest 7.6 that we’re focusing a lot of attention on feedback that we’ve gotten both from beginner Hippo developers – all the way through to some of the most advanced developers out there.

Our whole goal is to innovate the world of Java Open Source Web Content Management – and certainly we know that developers are a huge piece of that.   Over the coming weeks, I’m going to blog about some of these innovations in more detail.  But in case you haven’t kept up with some of our latest developments - here are some of them under the headings that we’re most passionate about:

Open Source & Open Standards 

Our passion for Open Source and Open Standards started 10 years ago – and we’re continually trying to stay innovative: from our most recent work and contributions to the Apache Foundation, to Open Social and our latest work with Surfnet and the MITRE Corporation.  And, we’re listening to you as well.  We heard you loud and clear.  Some of the recent new things in Hippo CMS include:

• Relaxed CND’s – making it much easier to set up document types
• A New HST REST Engine – giving developers an easy and standard way of accessing all their content.  
• Run & Develop Easier With Cargo Support
• JRebel Support to speed up your development cycle
• CMIS Support adds interoperability with ECM Systems (see what we’re doing with Nuxeo)
• Support for Spring MVC (also read this excellent post by Jeroen Reijn on Spring Android and REST)
• Handling changes in a DTAP environment

Templates & WCMS Developer Support

Of course one of the biggest jobs as a CMS developer is to quickly support the business users and their need to “change” things and keep up with the latest technologies.  From the expanded use of JavaScript, to HTML5, CSS3 and of course mobile and social interfaces - We’ve heard the community loud and clear that we needed to continually innovate. 

The ability to support rich user experiences and mobile interfaces is becoming a “must-have” for Web content management systems.  Our newest releases meet this challenge – providing Hippo CMS users the ability to develop any kind of HTML5 front-end experience that they wish.

Some of the other new things here include:

• Hippo CMS Template Composer
• Freemarker Template Support
• Pugpig - ok, it may not a Hippo project - but it’s really slick framework for HTML5 driven tablet magazines that we’re currently experimenting with (did I forget to mention PhoneGap?)

Love For The Process

And, of course, as I said in the beginning – the real passion is to make sure that we’re helping developers to make the process easier and more efficient.  So, we’ve added a whole new set of resources here for the developers.  These include:

• Our new Hippo Trail – which is a full set of documentation and videos that walk you through from taking your “first steps” all the way through to “Hippo Awesomeness”.
• Automatic Export – which makes it so much easier for the development team to work together using a revision control system like Subversion.
• Console Improvements – We’re adding a number of new enhancements here including auto completion.

As I said in the beginning – over the coming weeks, I’ll blog a bit more detail about some of these exciting new features and approaches.  In the mean time, keep the feedback coming.  We’re here for the community – and we want to see both you and Hippo shine!

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Josette Rigsbe wrote an article on CMSWire asking the question "Is JCR Dead?". I wanted to quickly respond with my answer, which in itself is a question: "so, what if it is?"

JCR is an engineering standard that's been around for a number of years. It's low-level. It's used by developers to build complex applications, usually on top of a content repository. Content management applications - like Hippo CMS - have been using JCR for years.

And, that's the point. JCR is a standard for developers. It's not a standard that will help you reach out to your audience. It's not a publishing standard in a format such that your visitors can consume it on their laptops, mobile phones or whatever device they want to use. It's not a standard that's going to help your Web content be "context-aware".

This is what REST API's and other Web standards are for. Our view at Hippo is that we do JCR for CMS Developers, and Web and REST for your audience.

There is no "Holy Grail" of standards, or one standard to "rule them all". It's clear to us that the evolving world of standards moves continuously and we believe that a WCMS needs to be flexible and open enough to move along side them. And, because standards evolve, they have a life of their own. They come to life, evolve and eventually they die. It's a very healthy process. So, yes, JCR evolves and will one day die. Just like CMIS will evolve - and one day die.

But the death of a standard doesn't matter to our customers. Our customers want interoperability. Our customers want our systems to be able to communicate with each other and to be able to export content out of a CMS whenever they want to replace it with another system. Standards are good. They give you that interoperability. But open standards are like languages. It really doesn't matter that they evolve. All that matters is that we can communicate.

If you're deciding on a content management system, you shouldn't need to worry about the life and death of standards. What matters most is that you want a CMS that serves your audience. For that you need to look further than just whether any vendor slaps the JCR or CMIS sticker on their repository. Look for a CMS that has openness built into its DNA. A CMS should breathe open standards. Look for a CMS that thinks in terms of your audience and how to deliver content in the way they want to consume it - not how the developer decided it should be consumed. At the end of the day, an effective CMS not only stores content in a way that empowers the business to manage it; it delivers the content in a way that empowers the person at the very end of a CMS - the audience - to consume it.

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

News from the Dutch open source camp:

"On March 31, 2010, the first version of www.rijksoverheid.nl went live. This common website for all government ministries will make the central government more recognizable and accessible." (source: http://www.rijksoverheid.nl)

"Starting in 2010, the Dutch national government will communicate via a single website: www.rijksoverheid.nl. The various ministries will be added to the website in stages. As of its launch on 31 March, 5 ministries are currently active on this website. During the course of the year, the other ministries will be added." (source: http://www.rijksoverheid.nl)

I have to admit: our government has been very ambitious right from the start of this humongous project. The goal they set for themselves is not an easy one: to open up all information, in every possible way, using "Open Content, Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source".

It's no secret that this new grand website is based on a large set of open source components, among which many Apache projects, and of course my personal pride Hippo CMS. Hats off to Apache for being such a great open source community, and for being the foundation and source of inspiration for everything we do at Hippo!

"The government doesn't want to be tied to certain suppliers and licenses and therefore chooses for open standards and open source. [..] Using open standards will make it easier to exchange information with other government websites"

Congratulations to everyone who worked on this mega project, in particular everyone at ONS, Gerrit, Jettro, Michael, Gemma, all the JTeam guys, and of course the people here at Hippo: Bart, Berry, Frank, Ard, Stephan, Dennis, and the man who should receive an award for being the hardest working man in CMS business: Jeroen Reijn (maybe one day, he will :) ).

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This is work in progress - but I got so excited when I saw it working that I couldn't resist turning it into a quick Friday afternoon demo video. This functionality will be released in Hippo CMS 7.4 which is scheduled for June, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you for a bit of patience - but at least you'll have something to look out for :)

Suppose Joe is our author and he's working on a new article that he wants to push live. He requests publication, and sends the article off to his editor, Jane, for review.

I'm logging in as Jane now, and I can see the request that she got. Jane is fine with the article, so she pushes it live.

A couple of days later, Joe the author comes in again, and he changes some of that content he wrote before. And he requests publication again.

Jane logs in, sees the requests and wonders: What's new?

Hold it here - I need to explain some background. Of course we have versioning and history and all that. Every CMS does. But how easy is it to get to that comparison view? How many clicks do you have to perform to compare the current version of the document with the one that's online right now? And what kind of a view does it give you? How often do you do this? And if it would be *super* easy, wouldn't you just want to see that comparison view all the time? All in all, you're working with a team of editors in the same content pool and you need that contextual information about what's going on in the system, and who did what, where.

So that's what we did. We made it uber-super easy!

Click it - and there you go! That's what's new. Hippo CMS shows you the comparison view right there when you view the article. That is, when something has changed. It simply shows you the difference between the current version of the document and the one live on the website. How useful is that? If you need more information - you can of course dive into the version history, but this simple comparison view is probably all you need.

Again - we hope to be releasing this with Hippo CMS 7.4 in June, so hold tight.

In the meantime, let me know what you think - feedback is very much appreciated.

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 5:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)