Connect Blogs

We have been profiling the memory usage of BlueConic to find opportunities for reducing the footprint and to use the freed memory in a more efficient manner. To achieve this, we’ve been gathering heap dumps from performance tests and production environments.

This blog explains how easy it is to close the 'data gap' between SalesForce and your online channels: enrich SalesForce with user information gathered from your online channels and use SalesForce data to optimize the customer's journey on your online channels!

We are currently preparing the infrastructure for running BlueConic in a cloud environment. We have selected Amazon EC2 to host our application. We are currently testing BlueConic on several EC2 instance types and we’re tuning the software and configuration for better performance and scalability.

We have been experiencing a major classloader issue since java update _21, and _27 was no exception. One of our software components runs fine on older versions and suffered from a ClassNotFoundException on newer versions. This issue forced some of our customers to use update _20 although newer versions were available.

The latest java 6 updates have been causing all kinds of problems on our test environments. For every update, there were several critical issues for one of our supported operating systems. Most of these could be avoided by setting specific VM options, others were general problems without known workarounds.

In my previous blog, we discussed the war between Facebook and Google, which is centered around the ownership of customer profiles. With Google+, Google has made a new and significant move to try to break through the social network hegemony of Facebook. The question that comes to mind is why companies like Facebook, Google but also Apple and Microsoft consider customer profiles as the (new) pots of gold. The challenge is that to do truly cross-channel marketing, the focus should be on the customer, not on your product or content. The customer should be the center point of attention, and organizations, processes and technology need to radically adapt to realize this.

This is the first blog in a series describing the features of BlueConic. Being the first blog on the subject, the focus will be on the basic concepts used in BlueConic.

Marketing, according to Wikipedia, is the process by which companies determine which products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. To do marketing right, marketers need to know their customer as well as they can. That's the only way to determine which products or services might be of interest to them.

In my previous blog, we discussed the war between Facebook and Google, which is centered around the ownership of customer profiles. With Google+, Google has made a new and significant move to try to break through the social network hegemony of Facebook. The question that comes to mind is why companies like Facebook, Google but also Apple and Microsoft consider customer profiles as the (new) pots of gold. The challenge is that to do truly cross-channel marketing, the focus should be on the customer, not on your product or content. The customer should be the center point of attention, and organizations, processes and technology need to radically adapt to realize this.

Cross-channel Marketing sounds simple enough; engage with your customers across different channels. Personalize your message, adapt it to your customers intentions, behavior and thoughts. Although in theory this sounds simple, in practice it’s nothing more than a revolution. The challenge is that to do truly cross-channel marketing, the focus should be on the customer, not on your product or content. The customer should be the center point of attention, and organizations, processes and technology need to radically adapt to realize this.

As online marketers we are eager to create the best online experiences. Because we love our visitors, but more than that, because we love boosting our conversion ratios. Fortunately, the two don’t have to exclude one another.

Marketing, according to Wikipedia, is the process by which companies determine which products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. To do marketing right, marketers need to know their customer as well as they can. That's the only way to determine which products or services might be of interest to them.

The words multi-channel and cross-channel are used interchangeably, and while from an outside perspective they seem to have the same meaning, there is a subtle but very important difference between them.

Imagine a world where you are instantly recognized on all websites and other channels of an organization and every channel is tailored to your needs.

Not all content element already had setters... Lets discuss List, Table and Poll

Creating links via the Content API. How to manage the different types of links that are supported from code.

DTAP automation. Not only interesting for sysadmins.

Maven BUILD ERRORs due to missing artifacts. Meh. What can be done about it?

We have been a heavy investor, user and proponent of the open standard OSGi and modularisation in general. The disruptive transition in the Enterprise Java world from the old, monolithic thinking to the new way of thinking modular is not a smooth one though, and takes time. Last week I visited OSGi Devcon in London, so this is a good opportunity to talk about the state of OSGi, and where the Java Enterprise industry is moving.

Quickly translate GX WebManager pages to 54 other languages with Google Translate

One of the WCB guidelines tells you to use the proper coding conventions and prescribes the use of CheckStyle with a GX-specific configuration file. One of the things this configuration file makes you do is prefix all member fields with the "my" keyword. When you do this in Eclipse and then use the "Generate Getters and Setters" tool, you'll get methods like getMyAdvice() if you're not careful.

New stuff you probably didn't even know you had!

For keeping code maintainable, it is wise to make a clear division between different tasks in a project. The GX WebManager architecture allows such separations to be made in a very clear way: using separate WCBs. However, in practice it might sometimes be difficult to decide in what way to split up functionality and how to keep the code connected. In this post I describe one way of keeping the code connected: the EventManagerService.

We all build WCBs, but do we build them right?

Some tips & tricks for the updated inline mode in GX WebManager 990

on Wednesday I visited the NAF Insight WEB 2.0 conference in Nieuwegein (The Netherlands) and also gave a short presentation about the technology in the WEB 2.0 era.

Where would the web be without links? Where would WCB programmers be without wm:link? What do we really know about wm:link? Read on and find out.

For years, GX has focused on delivering Web Content Management solutions, especially for large, high-traffic customer facing websites. This year, GX has started to emphasize the product roadmap and our marketing positioning more towards one of our strategic themes Traffic and Conversion. Let me provide some background on why we do this, and what this means for our product portfolio.

5 Spring pitfalls - The answers part 3

5 Spring pitfalls - The answers part 2

In the early days of WebManager 9, I did a content migration by reading data from a set of XML files and storing them in WebManager. That was a hell of a job! The last couple of weeks I’ve been doing about the same thing, but this time it was much easier. Why? We now have the Connector API and the Content API!

one of the many improvements, changes and bugfixes you may find in the GX WebManager 9.8.0 changelog but one I'd like the highlight a little. As of 9.8.0 deployment on SUN JDK 1.6.0 is now fully supported!

Looking for a new forum or community? GX WebManager has a brand new forum!

At J-Spring 2009 I gave a talk about distributed OSGi, which is part the early draft specification for OSGi R4.2. Here are the slides!

10 years ago the Cluetrain Manifesto was first published. Not familiar with the Cluetrain manifesto? Click here to read all about it!

Read our reponses to the CMS Watch Vendor meme!

As most of you will already know the GX WebManager Component Framework is an application level abstraction build on top of the Apache Felix implementation of the OSGi™ specification. GX WebManager Components are basically services as are the platform services provided. Therefore building WebManager Components, that do a little more then just sitting there, means you are accessing other services. Here is a short overview of the different ways you can do that and why you should or should not prefer them.

Read more about the new Rich Experience Engine in GX WebManager!

Last time we pried open the hood of WebManager for an in depth look at the server side includes. Time to zoom in some more...