All things WCM

You heard about WEM. You laughed at it’s silliness. Then you gave it some thought. Do we really need yet another buzzword to describe web-based marketing?  Maybe we don’t. We are not here to debate the need or redundancy of acronyms, but understand how to take actionable steps to produce results. As an expert in your domain/market, you know your core business and needs for user engagement- we are not here to discuss that either. The goal of this post is to define what you need to achieve your WEM business goals using technology from Autonomy Corporation.

WEM, or Web Engagement Management,  is all about having a dialogue with your web visitors, so you can better educate, sell products, or whatever it is you want do with your web content. The Autonomy ‘Promote’ line of products enable you to acheive this ‘WEM’ solution.  Time and again, we have heard customers ask: Do we need the whole suite of Promote products sold by Autonomy? What does each product do? Do we just install, and the products work automatically (or to what extent)? Or do you need to customize each product? What skills do you need to implement a holistic solution? How would the resulting solution look like?

While there are many permutations and combinations of products and customizations possible to achieve an enterprise web engagement management system, in this post we will talk about the necessary ingredients for one such solution.

So, without further ado, here are the ingredients:

TeamSite 7.2.1 (or 7.3  – promised to be released soon),
FormsPublisher – comes built-in with TeamSite,
SitePublisher – built into TeamSite starting with versions 7.0,
OpenDeploy,
LiveSite Content Services (LSCS),
LiveSite Display Services(LSDS),
IIS, Apache or other WebServer,
Oracle or SQLServer (database is optional – we’ll discuss this in more detail later on),
One of Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Solaris or RHEL Operating system.

In future posts, we’ll talk about how to develop a highly engaging enterprise website. We’ll discuss creating effective site layouts and templates – as it applies to SitePublisher and LiveSite,  developing rich, dynamic Components, audience targeting components using Segmentation and Targeting modules, etc. While some of this information is for a  technical/development audience, the end goal is for business users with no technical skills to easily manage the user web experience. In a good architecture, once the solution is built, modifying your system to react and pro-actively address market conditions is trivial and  non technical.