TECHNICAL WHITE PAPER
Overcoming Obstacles to
Contextualization
www.coremedia.com
TECHNICAL WHITE PAPER
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: THE WEB IS BUSINESS
In the early days of the Web, online publishing was always a linear, one-way experience.
Typical company websites contained little more than basic information, and were
often regarded as an afterthought — disconnected from a company’s core business.
All that has now changed. The Internet has evolved into a rich, interactive, multiplatform experience that can be accessed at any time, from any place, and by an
ever-growing array of devices. These days, even climbers on Mount Everest can
download email to their smart phones as they ascend the summit. And some of the
largest companies in the world conduct their business almost entirely online.
Today, the Web is all about engagement. Simply having a website alone is not enough.
We all expect a greater variety of features from the online services that we use every
day. We want to have conversations, be a part of a community, seek out news and
entertainment that’s relevant to us, and we want to transact on our own terms. To
succeed online, companies have to be able to provide experiences that not only meet,
but exceed these growing expectations.
In an investigation of Web content Management (WCM) investments conducted by
Forrester Research, 78% of those surveyed indicated that their firms will invest in
WCM initiatives. Of those respondents, 51% said that they will use their WCM
implementations for multichannel marketing purposes.1 For most companies,
however, this means going beyond just publishing to new platforms. To be competitive on the Web, companies need to take the entire customer experience into account,
including behavioral, situational, historical, social, and predicted interactions. The
complete adaptation of the customer experience to the customer’s needs and situation
is what we call contextualization.
Companies around the world are already making significant investments in contextually-aware computing infrastructures. Gartner predicts that 40% of the world’s smartphone users will opt into context-aware services and2 the worldwide economic effect
of context-aware computing will exceed $140 billion per year by 2015.3
This paper is for IT professionals who are tasked with the challenge of delivering
dynamic, contextually relevant online experiences. It describes the key technical
challenges and describes how CoreMedia is able to address these specifically so that
companies can execute their digital strategies and innovate with confidence and
without constraints. It also addresses what IT needs to do to empower business users
with the tools they need to manage their content ecosystem, design the customer
experience and ensure success in the world of the contextual Web.
2
The New Rules of Web Content Management
What Is Contextualization and Why Is it Important?
When the Web was primarily a one-way medium, managing online content involved a
simple assembly line of creating templates, authoring content, publication, and delivery.
As the Web has evolved, however, the rules governing Web Content Management have
evolved with it.
Static pages delivered in the same way to all visitors — regardless of their identity, need
or circumstances — are no longer sufficient. Especially in today’s mobile world — with
smart phones set to replace traditional computers as the primary means of accessing the
Internet.3 The days of the one-size-fits-all, PC-driven Web are over. In fact, analysts predict
that by 2016, one-third of worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be context-aware.4
Visitors increasingly expect a customized Web experience — no matter who they are, where
they’re located, or what device they’re using. For content providers, this now means that
relevant, meaningful content has to be identified and served on demand in order to respond
to each, unique customer situation.
And it isn’t just content publishing and delivery that has to change — the way in which
companies manage and orchestrate their content needs to evolve as well.
As online interactions become increasingly driven by business processes and transactions,
Web experiences can no longer exist in isolation from the rest of the business — nor can
your Web content repository. A truly contextual Web publishing environment now demands
a comprehensive interface with your company’s entire information ecosystem — including
inventory systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise resource
planning (ERP) systems, and more.
Finally, the organizational demands generated by contextualization means that business
users need to be empowered to create, manage, and modify the online experience of their
visitors. In the age of the contextual Web, online experiences must be unique for every
visitor and consistently up-to-date. Traditional IT processes are not fast enough, nor are they
sufficiently scalable, to meet these new requirements, particularly at a time when many IT
departments are faced with resource shortages and budget constraints. From both a content
ownership and resource perspective, these tasks can no longer sit exclusively with IT.
Instead it will increasingly fall to marketers, editors, publishers, and business managers
to own the responsibility for defining the context and provisioning content for a series of
uniquely customized Web experiences. To support this, companies will need to recognize
that to create effective context-aware engagement, online content has to range well beyond
the boundaries of traditional WCM.
The key to success lies in enabling your business users, and providing them with the access
and support they need to support their online goals. Typical activities here would include
giving them the ability to access information from across their organization’s entire
content ecosystem — regardless of where it is located or which applications are involved,
and allowing them to manage complex business rules and logic — things that used to be
strictly development tasks. And they must be able to do it in a way that is fast, efficient,
and intuitive.
3
TECHNICAL WHITE PAPER
IT as the Enabler of Contextualization
Although contextualization is the key to building a successful online business, making it
a reality can be difficult for companies still stuck with a traditional, static Web infrastructure.
Contextualization impacts companies at many different levels, including:
JJ
Business managers who are under pressure to adjust their online offerings to meet
evolving consumer preferences
JJ
Marketing and creative departments who need to develop relevant content
JJ
IT staff who are responsible for enabling all of these operations.
In order to compete effectively in this new online world, companies will have to invest in
scalable Web technologies that can support truly engaging experiences for their visitors.
And it is the responsibility of the IT department to select and implement these technologies
in a way that ensures their overall business success.
This responsibility brings with it some significant IT challenges:
JJ
How to provide a harmonized information architecture for the organization’s
content ecosystem?
JJ
How to keep hardware costs reasonable and maintain reliable performance
in a dynamic real-time delivery environment?
JJ
How to effectively empower business users?
JJ
Finally, how to make sure your organization stays ahead of the inevitable growth
and demands of the Web economy.
The following section describes each of these challenges and explains how a modular,
component-based platform is the best choice for IT professionals seeking a scalable path to
contextualization.
Overcoming the Technical Challenges of Contextualization
Content Ecosystem Challenges
You can only meet (or exceed) your visitors’ needs online if you are able to master the
content infrastructure required to support a full range of online interactions. This level
of orchestration requires a robust engine built on a flexible information architecture that
harmonizes content across disparate sources, such as your WCM, CRM or ERP solutions.
HARMONIZE YOUR CONTENT ECOSYSTEM AROUND YOUR BUSINESS RULES
Every enterprise software system stores and manages content (WCM, CRM, ERP, etc.)
within a unique data structure and organizational logic. For example, Web Content
Management solutions typically base their view of the world on concepts associated
with traditional online publishing — primarily Web pages and publishing templates. CRM
systems, on the other hand, are structured around concepts such as leads, contacts,
customers, and conversations.
4
These systems typically exist in isolation from one another and, due to this disconnected
existence, are effectively incomplete. The vast majority of any organization’s business
processes cut across functional areas and cannot easily be managed by a single software
point solution. Each provides an isolated perspective based on the objects stored within
their respective applications — be it your Web repository, a product database, or a set of
social visitor profiles.
As useful as these tools can be, they are incapable of reflecting the totality of your company’s business model or objectives. The primary purpose of your enterprise is not to build
websites, manage customer data, or update product inventories. These are just tools. Your
business is about delivering the experiences to the right visitor — when and how they want
them, and profitably.
In order to provide relevant, dynamic Web experiences to your visitors, you need to harmonize these disparate content systems around a shared business logic — a set of rules and
concepts that are rooted in your everyday business reality. And, because your business is
increasingly happening online, the most appropriate place for this logic to reside is within
your WCM system. However, in order to provide truly contextual experiences, this shared
business logic needs to provide a data model for content objects and their relationships that
goes beyond traditional, static Web concepts such as pages and templates.
Let’s say that you operate an online events portal that promotes local performance venues.
You might want to define an object called “Event” that includes things such as concerts,
festivals, trade shows, etc. To transform this static object into a “contextual” object, its
native properties (information such as title, date, location, and description) need to be
augmented with contextual or transactional data drawn from other enterprise systems.
This might include the number tickets available for an event (from a ticketing system), or
the pricing policy — that might be stored in your CRM system and vary depending on each
customer’s status.
All of this needs to take place on demand, without requiring expensive, time-consuming
“translation” effort from an organization’s IT or business users.
INTEGRATE YOUR CONTENT DYNAMICALLY AT RUN-TIME
The sophisticated content orchestration described above requires a system that allows you
to model your business abstractly in the layer that sits above the content management
system itself. This type of modeling is performed at build-time and is a prerequisite of
any contextual WCM system. But to really make contextualization a reality, you need to
re-examine your run-time environment as well.
In a contextual system, the native properties of Web content objects need to be merged
with external data from other systems to form a new augmented object. Usually, this kind
of data integration is achieved by extracting data from external applications and importing
it directly into the WCM repository — causing the data to be duplicated in another system.
This can create unmanageable redundancies, impeding performance and increasing the risk
of inconsistencies across the content infrastructure.
5
TECHNICAL WHITE PAPER
A recommended approach here would be to extract data on demand and combine it with
the properties of the native Web objects at run-time. Communicating directly with other
enterprise systems not only ensures that you are accessing the most up-to-date data — it
also allows you to reuse the underlying business logic and processing power of these
applications. This data can be managed via traditional relational database systems or more
scalable NoSQL storage architectures. Smart enterprises will utilize both.
Let’s return to our example, where we have defined an augmented object called “Event”
that is composed of native information stored directly in the WCM repository (such as title,
description, date, and location) as well as additional data stored in external data repositories (such as price and availability of tickets). When a Web visitor requests a list of upcoming
concerts, our augmented “Event” object can now be assembled on-demand, and the price
and availability are retrieved on demand from the ticketing system.
These “augmented” objects must be treated in the same way as any native object in the
Web repository. If a business user submits a query for “jazz events that cost less than $20,”
the system will respond with a list of relevant concerts. And, once the last ticket to an event
is sold, the event’s availability will be updated to “none” and the event will disappear from
the query results. This frees up valuable online inventory for events where there are still
tickets available.
System Performance Challenges
The success of your Web properties depends on their ability to maintain optimal online
performance. This means delivering the most up-to-date content in the most efficient
way — regardless of the number or type of visitors.
If your Web properties consist exclusively of pre-rendered, one-size-fits-all content, the
performance challenges will be minimal. However, when you’re serving millions of social
and contextualized interactions each month, the performance demands will increase
exponentially.
Contextualization not only pushes the limits of traditional WCM systems, but it can also
place an additional load on an organization’s other enterprise applications involved in the
delivery of customized content. These additional loads can lead to coompanies choosing
to sacrifice online contextual relevance and social interactivity — delivering fewer dynamic
elements in Web properties, updating content infrequently, and compromising on the experience to the customer — in order to maintain the performance of their enterprise systems.
The key here is to be able to process and deliver meaningful content in the appropriate format
as your audience interacts with you — while still respecting the underlying business logic.
IMPLEMENT MULTI-LEVEL, EVENT DRIVEN CACHING FOR OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE
In a dynamic Web environment, optimal performance depends on the ability to select
and assemble relevant content on-demand. This can require immense processing power
if memory is not used efficiently. Fortunately, there’s a better way to provide up-to-date
content dynamically without incurring exorbitant hardware costs: smart, multi-level caching
with an event-driven invalidation mechanism.
6
Multi-level means that you don’t just cache the final Web page. Page-level caching on its
own provides limited performance benefits in a dynamic Web environment where every
visitor is potentially seeing an entirely different assemblage of page elements. Page caching
is also useless when you want to reach visitors on mobile devices or social networks, where
the presentation requirements might be radically different from a standard Web page.
In addition to page caching, you also need to cache content at the business object and
content level as well. Not only does this ensure that all contextually-relevant content is
immediately ready to be assembled into a new page for every visitor, it also guarantees that
all relevant external data is cached along with the native Web content.
However, in order to cache content at multiple levels, you need a system that is capable
of storing and managing content at the object level rather than the page level. This is a
capability that many traditional WCM systems lack.
Smart caching with event-driven invalidation means that the cache is only refreshed when
something actually alters the status of a stored content object. When an event triggers a
change in the cache at one level, the system automatically communicates this change to
all the other caching levels as well — including pages, business objects, and data. Smart
caching thus keeps track of all dependencies between content items for instant updates
and ultimate performance.
As an example, let’s say you have defined a business object called “Concert” with the
property, “Availability,” which is true by default. There is no need for the WCM system to ask
an external ticketing system if tickets are still available so long as the concert’s Availability
is true. As soon as the last ticket is sold, however, the ticketing system must send an event
“Last ticket sold for concert” to the WCM as notification. This information is then processed
by the cache, which invalidates the value for the property Availability — but not the whole
content object, because all other information associated with object is still valid. All referring lists and sites that rely on this information are informed instantly.
LIBERATE YOUR CONTENT FROM FIXED LAYOUTS, NAVIGATION, AND ASSEMBLY LOGIC
Most modern WCM systems claim to separate content from the design and layout of your
Web property. All this typically means is that editors don’t need a detailed knowledge of
HTML in order to publish content to the Web. To ensure true flexibility and optimal performance for a contextual experience, however, there are two additional elements that need to
be separated from both content and layout: your navigation structure and assembly logic.
Navigation logic determines how the various pages and navigational tools on a Web property (including pages, menus, directories, and other elements) are linked, and establishes
the various paths that visitors can follow to access those objects online. It also determines
the extent to which a visitor will be able to access content on devices with unique interfaces — such as a smart phone with touch screen capabilities.
The assembly logic, on the other hand, determines which content objects will appear on a
page for a given visitor or platform. For example, a designer might create a Web structure
that includes a “Hot Events” module at the top of the home page — this is part of the
layout. But it’s up to the assembly logic to select the specific event details that will occupy
that space at runtime.
7
TECHNICAL WHITE PAPER
Most traditional WCM systems apply a fixed, page-based approach to navigation and
assembly, which makes it difficult to reuse content across multiple touchpoints. In addition,
such systems don’t support the reuse of underlying business logic to automatically select
the right content for the right context based on a predefined set of business rules. Instead,
they rely on a rigid publishing paradigm in which content assembly is inextricably tied to a
pre-defined presentation template.
As a result, the only way to change the content that appears in a given location on the Web
page is for an editor to manually update it. Likewise, if you want to optimize your site or
another device or platform (particularly mobile devices), you need to create a new layout
and navigational structure that is specifically designed for that device.
These fixed dependencies between content, navigation and assembly force editors to
constantly rebuild and redeploy their site for new audiences and devices. This is an enormous waste of time and resources.
A more flexible approach is to use a component-based paradigm that defines both content
assets and their relationships according to the logic of your unique business domain — and
allows the system to assemble (and re-assemble) pages on demand. This approach utilizes
a separate business abstraction layer to analyze a visitor’s context and select the relevant
content and layout before the resulting page is rendered and optimized for a given device.
Take the example of a “Hot Events” module on our Events Portal landing page. In a component-based system, all that needs to go to the WCM’s assembly system is a list of available
events. This list can then be refined and filtered based on a set of pre-defined input criteria
that have been defined in the business abstraction layer (e.g. events within the next two
days, events with a discount of at least 10%, events with only 10 tickets left, or events in the
vicinity of the visitor). The assembly logic then applies these criteria to the content repository and retrieves the appropriate event listings.
It is only when the assembly logic is decoupled from the rendering process and tied to your
business rules that it can it be reused to provide unique, contextually relevant content —
regardless of the visitor’s circumstances or the device being used (e.g. on the Web, mobile
devices, enterprise intranets, and social networks). This approach guarantees lower implementation costs and better utilization of resources, as well as improved output consistency.
Business User Challenges
Non-technical business users, such as online marketers, communications specialists or
channel managers, require an approach to Web Content Management that goes beyond the
ability to create content and publish it to the Web. Business users must have the ability to
link online publishing with other business processes, they must be able to design the correct
online experience for all visitor segments and touchpoints, and they need the capability to
test and preview the results before going live. This requires an intelligent WCM system that
is designed from the ground up with business users in mind.
8
Ultimately it’s about the workplace. Does your IT infrastructure reflect the business users’
everyday reality? Or does it enforce a narrow, technically constrained view of the world?
An environment that’s tailored to your business users’ needs will not only increase productivity and lower training costs, it will also unleash their creative powers and increase your
company’s ability to engage with your audience.
ALLOW BUSINESS USERS TO CONTROL THE ONLINE EXPERIENCE
Business users are experts in their own domains. Be it marketing, communications,
customer relationship management or support — they know their own part of the business
and they know their audience. However, to deliver a compelling Web experience they need
a user interface that reflects this domain expertise and enables them to apply it consistently
without having to become a certified technical expert on your WCM system.
It is the responsibility of IT to convert these business user requirements and domain
specific logic elements into a solution that is capable of meeting the full range of customer
demands. To accomplish this goal, your WCM system must be adaptable to your existing
software-ecosystem and the needs of your business users. Traditional usability standards
are only the beginning. In today’s increasingly contextual Web environment, WCM systems
must provide a user experience that goes beyond simple editing and publishing tools.
The most effective approach to this challenge is to provide a business abstraction layer
that augments Web content objects with relevant data stored in external systems and
represents the relationships between these objects. This can then be exposed to the
business users through an intuitive user interface that allows them to combine business
rules, Web content, and enterprise information from across the organization and deliver
contextual experiences for any Web visitor.
Imagine an event manager whose responsibilities include publishing a regular “Featured
Events” list on an online entertainment portal. She needs more than just a list of events and
ticket prices. She needs information about the customer’s preference, applicable discounts,
and any special promotional campaigns that may impact its marketing — all of which is
likely to be stored outside of the WCM system. Your WCM system should be able to represent the whole picture — not just the objects and relationships that happen to be stored in
your company’s Web content repository.
ENABLE BUSINESS USERS TO DEFINE THE RULES THAT DRIVE CONTEXTUALIZATION
We have mentioned the need to provide a clear separation of content, assembly logic, and
layout. But it is the business logic that is at the heart of any dynamic and context-relevant
content selection process. And to be successful, your WCM system must place the definition
and control of this logic squarely in the hands of the business users.
This business logic is represented by a set of flexible rules that are executed in real time.
They can be quite broad or very specific. Examples might include: “Show concert X to jazz
fans that have not attended the show yet” or “Provide a discount to Web visitors who have
reviewed two or more previous shows.”
9
TECHNICAL WHITE PAPER
It is the business users who understand better than anyone in the organization the criteria
for delivering contextual content to specific customer segments. Therefore it makes sense
for business users to be empowered to create and test those rules — rather than leaving
the job of coding and maintaining selection criteria to IT as part of the overall underlying
infrastructure.
A true, next generation WCM needs to provide business users with more than just a workspace to edit and manage content. In the age of contextualization, empowered business
users require a new kind of interface — a creative environment that reflects their business
realities while enabling them to create business rules and customer segments, craft a wide
range of contextual experiences for increased customer engagement, experiment different
online business scenarios, and preview everything in real time. This is the missing link in
traditional Web Content Management. We call this missing link ‘context management’ and
believe it needs to now be at the heart of any serious, context-aware Web infrastructure.
Growth Challenges
While it would be simpler to imagine an out-of-the-box product or solution that will provide
you with all the Web features and functionality that you will need, the reality is that your
current requirements are just a snapshot and they are bound to change over time. You need
a Web technology platform that can expand and evolve over time as your business grows
and technologies advance.
Five years ago, who would have expected that touch screen devices would so comprehensively redefine the mobile Web experience? Or that visitors would turn their consumption of
Web content into a two-way conversation based on social media? A Web Content Management platform must enable you to respond successfully to evolving and disruptive technical,
business and social changes. This means that, no matter how impressive the product demo
might appear, you still need to consider how well the platform would fit into your environment — now and in the future.
I MPLEMENT AN OPEN, SCALABLE INFRASTRUCTURE THAT CAN GROW WITH YOUR
BUSINESS
Building a responsive and contextual WCM system will help you drive more visitors, more
requests, more traffic, and ultimately provide business value. To handle this, a system has
to be able to scale horizontally without putting excessive demands on your existing hardware infrastructure. This kind of dynamic scalability provides you with the ability to grow
without compromises and helps you to use resources more efficiently — particularly during
peak times. An additional benefit of this approach is that it makes your infrastructure more
robust and reliable, since load and responsibility are shared across multiple machines.
As your company grows, your business and technical requirements will change as well,
which means that your solution must be able to adapt to these new demands. For example,
you may need to integrate with a new back-end recommendation engine for content, or to
a new delivery channel such as in-store kiosks.
10
As a result, your system should be built with extensibility in mind. Even the most sophisticated and versatile solution has to evolve over time as your business grows and transforms.
You need a WCM platform built on open technologies that can incorporate your existing
infrastructure as well as support emerging best-of-breed technologies — not a monolithic
suite of one-size-fits-all applications.
This means that a modern WCM platform must provide you with a robust and documented
API together with configuration capabilities that allow extensions to address your requirements — today and into the future.
CoreMedia 7: As Flexible as the Future
CoreMedia 7 is the only enterprise-ready WCM system that is capable of helping you
overcome all of the challenges of contextualization. It has been designed to empower
your Business and IT teams so that they can define what constitutes a true contextual
experience — for each segment of your audience and every touchpoint.
CoreMedia 7 features an enhanced CoreMedia Studio, a completely new creative environment that allows business specialists such as online marketers, communications professionals and channel managers to design and test complete online experiences for their
visitors.
At CoreMedia we put the entire content ecosystem — along with key determinants that
drive contextualization — at your business users’ fingertips so that they can design and
preview the experience in real time using intuitive and familiar business rules. We ensure
that, across all touchpoints, your prospects and visitors have a highly relevant and consistent experience with your brand and products.
CoreMedia 7 also includes the company’s powerful Content Application Engine (CAE) platform for dynamic delivery. It integrates the latest versions of CoreMedia’s personalization
module and Elastic Social software, as well as comprehensive mobile publishing capabilities,
to support the development and delivery of contextualized Web experiences on any device
across any channel.
CoreMedia provides one of the most powerful and flexible Web Content Management
platforms on the market. Whatever experience you imagine and design, we will make sure
that it is efficiently delivered and optimized, on-demand.
1 Web
Content Management Is Alive And Well in 2011 Thanks To Online Customer Experience, Forrester
Research Inc., March 2011.
2 Context-Aware
Computing and Social Media Are Transforming the User Experience, Gartner, February 2012.
3 The
2011 Gartner Scenario: Current States and Future Directions of the IT Industry, Gartner, January 2011.
4 2012
KPCB Internet Trends Year-End Update, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, December 2012.
5 The
2011 Gartner Scenario: Current States and Future Directions of the IT Industry, Gartner, January 2011.
11
Germany, Switzerland, Austria
CoreMedia AG
Ludwig-Erhard-Straße 18
20459 Hamburg
Germany
The Americas
CoreMedia Corporation
118 Second Street, 5th Floor
San Francisco CA 94105
USA
Europe, Middle East and Africa
CoreMedia Ltd.
90 Long Acre
Covent Garden
London WC2E 9RZ
United Kingdom
Asia Pacific
CoreMedia Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd.
25 International Business Park
#0–106 German Centre
Singapore 609916
Tel+ 49 .40.32 55 87 .0
Tel+ 1 .415 .371 .0400
Tel+ 44 .207 .849 .3317
Tel+ 65 .6562 .8866
For more information, please visit our website: www.coremedia.com
Email: [email protected]
Copyright 2013. CoreMedia AG. All rights reserved. Google is a trademark of Google, Inc.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 0213-TP-EN-CMS001