Rivet Logic Announces the Spinoff of Crafter Software

This week Rivet Logic announced the launch of Crafter Software Corporation, which will offer commercial support and licenses for the Crafter CMS open source project (previously known as Crafter Rivet). Crafter CMS is an award-winning web content and experience management solution that allows organizations to build and manage rich online experiences on the web, mobile, social, and all digital online channels.

“We have seen tremendous commercial demand for Crafter’s modern, open and well-designed solutions in a variety of industries,” said Mike Vertal, CEO of Rivet Logic. “With hundreds of sites now in production and interest surging from major organizations around the world, we knew the time was ripe to spinoff a new company entirely focused on continued development and global support of Crafter.”

Crafter Software’s solutions are offered as both a Community Edition under the GNU open source license, and as an Enterprise Edition with a commercial license and global support.

Rivet Logic will continue to offer Crafter consulting and full-lifecycle implementation services for Web content and experience management solutions.

What does this mean for you?

If you are an existing Crafter Rivet user or customer, you will continue to get the great consulting and solution support from Rivet Logic, along with software support from the dedicated team at the new Crafter Software — all from the same team that was supporting you before.

If you are considering Crafter for your next Web content management solution, you now have the extra confidence that Crafter Software has been established to focus on the continued innovation, development and support of Crafter on a global basis.

If you have any interest in a new, modern enterprise Web CMS that was built for the new era of web engagement, check out the new Crafter Software at craftersoftware.com and craftercms.org

Learn More

To read the press release, visit www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130507006137/en/Web-Experience-Management-Simplified-Crafter-Software

For more information on Rivet Logic’s Crafter-based WCM/WEM solutions and consulting services, visit rivetlogic.com/solutions/web-content-management and rivetlogic.com/services/crafter-consulting

Remaining competitive in today’s market means customer-driven companies must continue to provide their clients with added value, and one of the most effective ways of achieving this is through a customer portal that enables a holistic view of the information customers care about the most. Customer portals also present an opportunity for organizations to generate revenue through strategic discovery features that expose clients to products they might be interested in.

Liferay for Customer Portals

Liferay Portal provides a versatile platform for solving a variety of business needs, including intranets and extranets, collaboration sites with blogs, wikis, and forums, consumer facing websites, and social community sites with built-in social networking features. And one of the most common use cases we’ve seen is customer and self-service portals.

Liferay’s site-based architecture makes it ideal for customer portals. A key capability of these portals is to provide separate sites, pages, and content for each customer. And since Liferay allows you to easily create individual customer sites with very little work, the scoping of the content and digital assets within those sites is supported natively.

LIferay easily supports the two most important features of customer portals – personalization and site-based security.

• Personalization – Liferay allows for creation of personalized pages for each customer. The information collected within each customer site can then be utilized in creative ways to further enhance personalization and increase user engagement. Liferay roles and teams are often used as an elegant way to differentiate between user types within a single customer site, which in turn opens the door for further fine-grained personalization.
• Site-based Security – Liferay’s architecture facilitates security by enabling straightforward management of site members and their permissions within the site. Moreover, end users can be appointed as site administrators to help decrease help desk load while providing customers with much needed content ownership and management capabilities.

Challenges and Solutions

Every project has its challenges, and it’s important to follow best practices and address them in the beginning to ensure a smooth implementation. From our experience in implementing customer portals of varying sizes, we’ve seen a number of common challenges and have found successful ways of addressing these with Liferay’s flexible platform.

Information Architecture

The quality of the information architecture will have a large impact on the success of the portal. The information architecture defines the types of content your customers will see inside the portal and the navigation within the portal to get to the right content, so it’s critical to define and categorize the content and display it in a way that’s easy for the customer to understand. A customer portal that makes finding important content difficult is destined for failure.

To resolve this in Liferay, you need to gain a clear understanding of Liferay’s architecture along with best practices. It’s important to involve a customer sample when defining and categorizing your content to determine which content is important for each customer.

Integration

Integration is a critical part of every customer portal because, more often than not, the content that customers typically care about usually resides in external third-party enterprise systems, some of which may change over time. Therefore, the best way to approach integration is with a reusable integration layer.

Liferay supports this with their service builder library, which allows developers to create a standard service layer abstracting all integration logic. With this, technical architects can easily provide their developers with a standard API to use for systems integration, resulting in increased developer efficiency and better overall solution maintainability.

Flexibility

Many customer portal solutions in the market were built to satisfy the immediate needs of those customers. This often leads to the solutions becoming inflexible, so when new technology or new use cases are required, these solutions simply can’t keep up. In addition, today’s users expect Web-based solutions to constantly evolve and get better, making the portal solution framework’s flexibility a key factor in determining both short- and long-term success.

Liferay addresses this challenge with its native support for the implementation and deployment of custom plug-ins to address any future customer needs. Additionally, Liferay was built with customization in mind – almost every aspect of the portal can be customized or overridden without sacrificing the ability to maintain a clear and supported upgrade path.

Branding

The ability for a customer portal to support different branding aesthetics for each customer provides a much appreciated, tailored experience to the users of the portal. The challenge here is that the majority of portal frameworks in the market today don’t easily support site branding, which usually forces adopters of those technologies to stick with one look and feel for all customers. Support for interchangeable skins or themes in a portal, though challenging for the portal vendor, enables more personalized user experiences.

Liferay’s Themes, Layouts, Mobile Support, and Custom Site Metadata allow developers to create unique look and feel options for each customer. The technical knowledge required to implement different skins is standard user interface technology such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This doesn’t just make branding easy, but also quite flexible.

Innovation

Interaction within a customer portal is typically thought to be business-to-customer. However, customer interactions don’t have to be unidirectional, and a new market trend is introducing social customer-to-customer interaction within portals. This social interaction can be particularly beneficial to companies whose revenue depends on successful ongoing transactionality between customers.

Liferay’s flexible platform and robust feature set also allows it to support innovative new features as market trends change. Rivet Logic is proud to be one of the few, if not the only, Liferay partners to have implemented such a portal with a fully integrated marketplace experience for buyers and sellers of services to collaborate and transact within the portal. With features like Google Maps-based discovery, quote management, private messaging, customer service, and more, we were able to build an extremely successful customer portal with the help of Liferay’s flexible framework.

Liferay’s robust portal platform provides a versatile solution for satisfying a variety of enterprise needs, including building consumer-facing websites. Implemented correctly, these customer portals can bring great value to your customers, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Content targeting is all about getting the right content to the right user at the right time. While targeting used to be something large companies with big budgets utilized to make incremental improvements on transactions, it’s becoming increasingly important that organizations of all sizes start looking at content targeting.

This is largely attributed to the explosion of mobile device usage, which goes beyond just another form factor to how your sites are being used. People are online more often than ever before because they have their devices with them at all times. However, they are online in shorter bursts for specific, immediate needs in the context of their daily activity. In order to hold the attention of this new type of Web consumer, we must speak directly to them with content that is relevant to who they are, where they are, and what they need or are doing.

The tricky part is understanding your users, which can range in complexity. Usually, the more specific your overall goals and interactions with your user, the easier it is. However, in most real-world cases, we find that understanding a user can be quite complex. When a visitor visits a site, we need to determine the reason behind each specific visit. To do this, we must leverage both explicit information provided by the user (or about the user provided from sources like preferences or a profile page), and implicit information based on the user’s behavior on the site and other interactions with your organization.

When it comes to user behavior, certain behaviors are more accurate in helping us understand what a user wants. Behavioral targeting projects often discuss the use of click stream analysis, but this turns out to be a pretty inaccurate indicator of what the user actually wants. On the other side are purchases, which are great in that they tell us exactly what the user wanted. However, by that time, we’ve already missed out on the opportunity to engage with the user with up sells, cross sells, and other useful information. They already have what they need and are on their way. A purchase can certainly help us during the next visit, but it’s not usually that valuable during a visit.

However, when a user’s behavior is of the engagement type, they are telling us exactly what they want. Comments, ratings, and the ability to download content are quite important. Users love these types of features because it gives them a channel to communicate with your company and community. At the same time, these types of features are also the most accurate indicators of what the user wants during a given visit to your site, often prior to a major conversion like contacting your sales department, or even making a direct purchase.

Traditional approaches in handling audience-specific content on websites include creating mixed audience pages with content that speaks to more than one audience on a given page, or creating stove-pipe websites where sections are dedicated to each audience, or a mixture of the two. These approaches make it difficult for users to get to the content they want, especially in a mobile context.

With Crafter Rivet, we can handle content targeting in a much more effective way than these older approaches. Crater Rivet supports dynamic content through the use of templates, which along with the help of other components in the system, can make decisions about how, when, and what content to serve to any given user.

Content targeting in Crafter Rivet relies on a rules engine. The rules engine has access to information about the user which can be acquired from the user profile – populated by the user through a profile Web form, a CRM system integration, or other data source – location provided by the browser, social graph through Facebook integration, user activity tracked and recovered from analytics integration, and so on. Using these data points, the rules engine will work in conjunction with the template engine to create a unique, personal experience for each user or type of user.

To learn more about how Crafter Rivet can address content targeting, visit crafterrivet.org.

Leading enterprises are constantly looking to improve employee productivity by enabling efficient communications throughout the enterprise. This usually starts with an effective portal for human resources – an enterprise HR Portal – which enables organizations to disseminate corporate information to the work force in an engaging, efficient and intuitive manner.

Over the years, Liferay has evolved into a platform that can satisfy most Web-based enterprise needs, from corporate intranets to customer portals and enterprise websites. And one of the most popular Liferay use cases is the HR Portal, which is often the first step towards building an intranet. An HR Portal provides an efficient means of disseminating various company news and offers an ideal medium for employee outreach.

In a recent webinar, we demonstrated how to build an enterprise HR portal with Liferay in just 30 minutes. The demo showcased our latest open source Liferay community contribution that allows developers to easily create a fully functional HR Portal. This easy-to-deploy portal solution comes with many useful features, including:

• Corporate news authoring and publishing
• Customizable news publishing channels
• User-friendly people directory
• Customizable portal-wide main navigation bar
• Smart news carousel
• Customizable quick links

This HR Portal solution will soon be available in Liferay Marketplace – with the Community Edition available in a matter of weeks and the Enterprise Edition under development. Both versions will be available for free download.

Watch our recorded webinar to see a demo of the HR Portal in action!

Content targeting is all about getting the right content to the right user at the right time. While targeting used to be something large companies with big budgets did to make incremental improvements on transactions, it’s becoming increasingly important that organizations of all sizes start looking at content targeting.

Mobile devices have drastically changed the internet landscape, and the change they’re bringing is moving very fast as mobile use of the internet is expected to take over desktop use by 2014. And it’s not just about people visiting your sites on a different form factor, but also how they use your sites. People are online more often than ever before, but in shorter bursts for specific, immediate needs in the context of their daily activity. In order to hold the attention of this new type of Web consumer, we must speak directly to them with content that is relevant to who they are, where they are, and what they need or are doing.

So how do you tailor your website to deliver targeted content to specific audiences? Traditional approaches to handle audience specific content on websites include creating mixed audience pages with content that speaks to more than one audience on a given page, or creating stove-pipe websites where sections are dedicated to each audience, or a mixture of the two. These approaches make it difficult for users to get to the content they want and need efficiently, especially in a mobile context.

In our most recent webinar, we discussed in detail what content targeting is and how our Crafter Rivet WEM solution enables delivery of real-time, dynamic and personalized content based on visitor profiles, behavioral patterns, social graphs, and more.

To learn more, a recording of the webinar is available on our website, and the slides are available here.

We all know the importance of creating engaging and content-rich websites to keep up with the demands of the modern day user. New websites often need to be created quickly to satisfy a variety of business needs – new product launches, events, marketing campaigns, and more. The process should be hassle free, intuitive and user-friendly for content authors and publishers.

This is why we developed Crafter Rivet, our award-winning Web experience management application built on Alfresco 4. It provides business users with a powerful toolset for easily building rich websites.

In two recent webinars, we demonstrated some of the robust features of Crafter Rivet by showing users how to build a website from scratch with Crafter Rivet and Alfresco and how to migrate your existing website to Alfresco 4, both in just 30 minutes.

If you’re interested in seeing these demos, recordings of both webinars are available on our website, http://rivetlogic.com/resources/webcasts.

The term “Social Business” has been generating a lot of buzz lately, and many enterprises have set the gears in motion to achieve this. However, just like many other IT initiatives, it’s important to first understand what a social business really means, the drivers behind it, how your organization can stand to benefit, and the strategies behind a successful implementation.

KMWorld‘s June Best Practices White Paper focuses on the topic of Social Business Solutions, with a collection of articles around successful ways of achieving a social business. Rivet Logic participated in this white paper with an article on open and agile social business solutions, and discusses topics including business drivers, what it means to be a social business, social business value creation, and how to open source can help achieve the goal.

The full white paper is available for download on our website, http://rivetlogic.com/resources/information-center.

Over the years, Liferay Portal has transformed into a complete Web platform for social collaboration, Web content management, and development tools to create customized solutions.

The new Liferay Portal 6.1 EE features extensive updates to existing Web content management and document management systems plus new capabilities that are designed to provide more power to end users. Extensive user interface updates will make document management more productive and intuitive, with desktop and mobile access, live previews, and integration to external enterprise document repositories. Liferay 6.1 EE also simplifies the development and maintenance of rich websites, with sophisticated page templates and multiple site and page version editing. The new release also integrates with Liferay Marketplace, which will allow administrators to find and install applications to extend functionality directly from the portal.

“The new Liferay 6.1 EE release matures the 6.x branch with much anticipated implementations that in so many ways completes Liferay as an enterprise-grade product,” says Alaaeldin El-Nattar, Engagement Director and Certified Liferay Trainer at Rivet Logic. “Liferay 6.0 EE introduced several services that opened the door for the development of Auditing, Reporting, Workflow, and other enterprise features, while Liferay 6.1 EE takes Liferay as a leading and powerful portal framework and packages it into a fully functional enterprise ready portal solution. We have been waiting a long time for this release and are very excited about all the client needs that we will now be able to fulfill with relative ease. I am especially looking forward to making full use of Liferay 6.1’s new CMIS support, Document Sync, Website Management, and Mobile support. Cudos to the Liferay team on a job well done.”

To learn more, please visit www.liferay.com.

Over the past year, organizations of all sizes and have shifted their focus from basic Web content management towards Web experience management. As the amount of Web usage continues to grow for both consumers and enterprises, creating an engaging Web experience is now a top priority. I’m sure that many people have experienced incidents where a website’s lackluster UI or ineffective search that didn’t produce the right results have deterred them from spending more time on the site or even from ever returning. Losing out on these valuable customers is a costly mistake that organizations can’t afford to make. Thus, providing relevant content thru an engaging user experience is paramount to a successful online digital strategy.

And now, with new mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets being constantly introduced to the market, organizations need to make sure those same Web experiences are applied across all delivery channels.

When it comes to managing these Web experiences, it’s important to use the right WEM system to produce a consistent experience across the different channels, and doing so in an user friendly manner.

At Rivet Logic, we’ve been busy developing and enhancing Crafter Studio, our complete authoring and publishing environment for managing Web and enterprise content. Developed as a major extension to Alfresco, Crafter Studio is a user-friendly and extensible platform for managing multi-channel publishing for mobile, Web, social channels, etc.

One new feature we’ve recently released is the availability of different templates for the different publishing channels, allowing the system to serve the same content through the appropriate template for each publishing channel – iPhone, iPad, desktop, etc.

The demo below showcases this features along with Crafter Studio’s in-context editing and multi-channel in-context preview capabilities.

For more information on Crafter Studio, please visit our wiki.

Rivet Logic is happy to be one of the original Proposers of OASIS’ new WCM standard initiative, Web Experience Management Interoperability (WEMI). Russ Danner, one of our Senior Architects, is on the Technical Committee that will define the specifications for this emerging standard.

WEMI represents an evolution in WCM and is set to increase interoperability between WCM vendors, thereby driving down costs of Web content integration and publishing. Formed through the standards organization OASIS, WEMI endeavors to define a simple domain model for delivering aggregated content into a total Web Experience.

WEMI comes at the right time, as industry WCM requirements have now expanded to include the creation and management of rich, engaging and consistent Web experiences across multiple online channels that leverage numerous sources of content.

When complete, WEMI’s abstract feature set should constitute an international open standard, widely implemented by WCM/WEM systems. Existing standards only address content interoperability at the lower data level, which forces customers to implement costly customized solutions at the content presentation layer.

In addition to benefiting end users, extensibility of WEMI will allow Rivet Logic to leverage standard solutions across multiple industries and domains, saving our customers time and money.

For more information, visit http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wemi.