Martijn van Berkum

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Last year, GX implemented a new development philosophy for our software development unit called Open Development. Why did we do this? Find out in this new blog entry!

Last week, at our customer event in De Fabrique in Utrecht, the Netherlands, we officially launched the GX WebManager Community Edition. As a visitor of this website this is probably old news for you, as it was already available for a few weeks here. It's a free edition of our flagship product, perfectly usable for your websites.

In GX WebManager 9, the platform and the components have been separated. Modifying the platform implies checking if the other functionalities of the platform are still intact. Making changes to a component implies only checking if that specific component still behaves as expected. As a result, the engine of GX WebManager will always as be stable as the last release and will have a non-changing interface with the components. Only individual components (called WCBs, WebManager Component Bundles) can be modified and therefore be corrupted.

This article gives an overview of the integration possibilities of WebManager Component Bundles (WCBs) and Portlets. It also explains how these two concepts are complementary and can be used together for a more effective online channel.

Welcome on my weblog, and welcome at our new website: www.gxdeveloperweb.com. This website is one of the visual results of our strategy as a company to be even more open and agile to our stakeholders, in this case primarily developers. What can you expect of us on this website?