WebCenter Team

We all know the value of incorporating social computing features such as comments, ratings, reviews, polls and blogs into the web presence. These kinds of interactive capabilities are essential for driving customer engagement and fostering community around your brand. Ratings and reviews can also play an important role in influencing the buying behavior of other site visitors. Checking out online ratings and reviews is something many of us commonly due before selecting a particular product or service. These social capabilities certainly help cultivate loyal and satisfied customers who in turn recommend your brand to others. But before enabling these kinds of features on your web presence, there are some things you need to consider.

Whether you want to enable product reviews or commenting on articles, you’ll want to assure that the dialogue on your website remains focused and relevant.  To accomplish this, you’ll need to consider how best to approach the moderation of the user-contributed content your site visitors will be generating.  

With an open community approach, there really is no moderation.  All can contribute to the conversation and all contributions are published on your website automatically.  While this approach eliminates barriers to participation, encourages a very free dialogue and requires little oversight, there are some serious drawbacks. Open communities can invite spam, trolling or other inappropriate behavior that can be damaging to your brand. For many enterprises, an open community is simply an inappropriate choice.

On the opposite side of the spectrum is a controlled community approach.  In this type of approach, all user-generated content is subject to moderation prior to publishing.  All contributed content needs to be reviewed and approved by a community manager prior to publication.  While this approach encourages contributors to be on their best behavior and provides the community manager with the most control, this approach can result in a considerable delay in the publishing of user-generated content and can discourage social interaction on your web presence.

Enterprises that wish to encourage social interactivity while safeguarding brand integrity may want to consider striking a balance between these two approaches.  If your web experience management platform permits it, this can be done by introducing some level of automated or community member triggered moderation. For example, you might employ user white-lists and blacklists to help determine which site visitors require moderation for their comments.  You could also use customizable keyword filters that will trigger the moderation of comments that contain specific key words such as profanity. Another option is to enlist members of the community in the moderation process, by enabling site visitors to flag content that they think is inappropriate.  When a comment is flagged for moderation by an automated filter or by site visitors, it can automatically be assigned to the appropriate community manager for review, editing, approval or deletion. In this way, low risk user-generated content can be published to your site quickly, while content that may be a cause for concern enters a moderation queue for further review.

See how simple is it to deploy user-generated content features and moderation using Oracle WebCenter Sites.

Check out the latest edition of the Oracle Information InDepth Newsletter featuring the latest Oracle WebCenter news, best practices and resources.

In this issue, you’ll find:

• Five best practices for embracing responsive design from Oracle expert, John Brunswick
• The smartest journey to connected, multichannel customer experiences
• The latest webcasts and events on how to engage your customers and empower your business with Oracle WebCenter

Want to get the newsletter delivered directly to your inbox? Subscribe here.

Unable to get new digital marketing initiatives to market as fast as you would like?  Tired of dealing with IT bottlenecks that prevent you from making routine site updates or launching new digital marketing campaigns quickly?  Your customers have little patience for a brand that fails to meet their expectations for a contextually relevant and interactive digital experience that supports their journey as a customer.  As a result, speed-to-market and business agility are more important than ever before when it comes to gaining and sustaining a competitive advantage.  Are your existing web experience management tools and processes up to the challenge?

If you are a marketer that has to secure a developer resource whenever you want to create a new landing page or make an important update to your website, get ready for your competitors to eat your lunch.  Today’s market moves much too swiftly and companies with marketing teams that are forced to rely on IT for the execution of their digital marketing efforts are at a steep disadvantage.  That’s why it’s so important to have a web experience management platform that empowers marketers and other non-technical business users to manage many aspects of the digital customer experience themselves.

See how simple site authoring and editing are in WebCenter Sites in this brief video tutorial.

Oracle WebCenter Sites makes it easy for marketers to contribute and manage websites with visual and intuitive content authoring and layout capabilities designed for the non-technical user. Oracle WebCenter Sites enables marketers to simply drag ­and­ drop content right into the context of a web page using a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) authoring interface. Rich search functionality and visual search results make the process of locating images and other content for use within pages, streamlined and efficient.

Because of WebCenter Sites’ intuitive and easy-to-use tools for managing online experiences, our customers have gained the ability to get to market faster with their digital marketing initiatives.  As marketers and other line of business users take greater control of managing the web experience, our customers have seen the lead time for new online campaigns shrink from months or weeks down to a matter of days, and routine site updates can be made in a matter of minutes without having to secure a developer resource to execute them.

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Hello again everyone.

Well it's Friday and we would like to wrap up this week by showcasing another one of our great partners, Team Informatics.  For those of you that caught the webcast yesterday featuring Mortenson Construction, you might remember that Team Informatics is the partner that assisted Mortenson in their very successful roll out of WebCenter Content and Portal.  If you have not taken the time to check out the webcast, you can do so at anytime by registering here and viewing it on-demand at your leisure.  And once you register for the webcast, you can also freely access the latest whitepaper entitled  "The Top 10 Criteria for Choosing an Enterprise Content Management System" as well as a previous webcast on the "Seven Ways Content Can Improve the Health of Your Business".  It's fun for the whole family!  

Here is a brief overview of Team Informatics that we hope you will find useful and informative. 

TEAM Informatics, Inc. (www.teaminformatics.com) is an employee-owned, Minnesota-based software products and systems integration firm with a global customer base. TEAM was formed over 10 years ago and has experienced a sustained aggressive growth rate with over 200 global customers.

TEAM is an Oracle Software Reseller and a global member of the Oracle Partner Network, specializing in areas such as WebCenter Content, WebCenter Portal and WebCenter Sites (formerly FatWire). Offerings include professional services, managed services, enterprise and development support, and an expanding set of products. In addition, TEAM is a Google Enterprise Partner and Reseller for the Google Search technologies. TEAM's suite of business applications include TEAM Cloud for managed delivery of WebCenter products on an Oracle engineered system, TEAM GSA Connector for enterprise search, TEAM Sites Connector for enabling web experience management, TEAM Email Manager for email and communication compliance and management, and ContentWorx for complex document process management and assembly. Get more information on these and all of TEAM's offerings at www.teaminformatics.com.

With TEAM’s growing customer base, they have been able to showcase and announce key customer successes, as well as nurture partnerships to provide best-in-class solutions. Some of their most recent announcements include:

TEAM Informatics Provides Strategic Roadmap for City of Las Vegas Oracle WebCenter Deployment

Engineered to Work Together – TEAM Informatics WebCenter Sites Connector v. 1.1 for WebCenter Content

TEAM Informatics Announces Full Life-Cycle, Paper to Paperless Solution, with Gill Digital

TEAM Informatics Announces Growth in North American Public Sector with Continuing Success in Oracle WebCenter

TEAM Informatics Announces Award Winning Project with Mortenson Construction

These announcements reflect TEAM’s on-going strategy of providing solutions that get the most out of software, providing all-in-one solution packages, and growing in each vertical with each successful project. Their commitment to their customers is only strengthened by their commitment to Oracle technology.

For more information, a demo, or to have a conversation with TEAM, please contact them via this link.

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And in other news.... Are you a WebCenter Innovator?

Oracle Excellence Awards: Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Striving for success is what drives Oracle and its customers and partners to continually discover innovative uses for Oracle technology and to deploy successful and groundbreaking solutions and best practices. The Oracle Excellence Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation recognizes customers and partners that have excelled in driving business value together with Oracle in eight award categories including Oracle WebCenter. Nominations for 2013 Awards are now open. Details and nomination forms can be found here.
Deadline for submission is June 18th, 2013!

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Today, Thursday May 16th at 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific, we will be broadcasting a new webcast featuring a WebCenter customer, Mortenson Construction.  I hope you can take the time to join us, either live or later on by viewing it on-demand.  Many of know the benefits of enterprise content management (ECM) but they have taken it to another level by making sure that every person involved in a construction project has immediate access to the info they need.

OK, so some of you may be saying, isn't that what ECM is all about?  Immediate access to the right content in order to make the right business decisions.  Well, yes, ideally but I suspect we all know scenarios where that is not necessarily the case.  For businesses that do not take the time to incorporate a centralized approach to content management and dissemination, ECM can become a great place to hide information, not use it effectively.

Mortenson Construction has done a great job of making sure that project owners, managers, designers, architects, trade partners and finance teams all have secure access into the project information they need.  And best of all, they can do it from anywhere, on mobile devices, even on the job site itself.  Most of us are not in the construction industry but we have seen projects underway.  

You've probably seen the trailers that are placed on the job site so that managers, foreman and various craft workers can meet and discuss the latest design specifications and resolve problems as they arise. But what about the work team on the 16th floor of the high-rise being built?  Do they have to take an extended break every time there is an issue to resolve and make their way back to the trailer to discuss it? Not if they work at Mortenson!  They have a portable "Field Box" that is effectively a small office in a steel container. It can be moved anywhere by crane and be immediately online with access to every bit of project information.

Mortenson calls this "Project Connect" and it is a great example of how a company can take the power of content that must be securely managed within an ECM system to meet information governance and compliance requirements and get it to every one that needs it... anywhere!

We hope you will join the webcast tomorrow and hear directly from the team at Mortenson Construction about the benefits that they are realizing by using WebCenter Content as their ECM system.  Maybe you can realize some of those benefits too!

Click this link to join us and register to watch this informative webcast. 

Welcome back to the WebCenter Blog.  

Last week, we presented a number of different partner solutions for WebCenter.  This week we will be focusing a bit more intently on the value of Content Management in the enterprise and to start things off, we'll be hearing from our partner, aurionPro SENA about their offerings for WebCenter, including their mobile app and Accounts Payable solutions.

__________________________________________________________________________ 

The buzz throughout the halls of recent conferences spotlights “glamorous” technologies: cloud, social, mobile. It’s the mantra of industry analysts and has been adopted by pretty much everyone. Cloud, social, mobile. The ‘triad’ is unavoidable. Many of our customers are asking to implement Facebook or Yammer-style intranet solutions, and everyone’s asking for mobile delivery of more and more content. We’re proud that we've done some of the most innovative work completed to date building mobile apps and social/collaborative platforms leveraging the WebCenter suite (a few examples are included near the end of this post). But WebCenter is not just about cutting edge use cases.

aurionPro SENA has been working with WebCenter and its underlying technologies from the very beginning. In fact, ten of our technical, sales, and executive leaders were long-time Optika, Stellent, and/or Oracle employees (including our newest leadership team member, Ed Jackowiak, who previously was leading Oracle’s efforts to build and grow the North America IDM business). With over a decade of focused experience, and Specialized Status in both WebCenter Content and WebCenter Portal, we’ve seen and solved pretty much every use case possible…both the glamorous and the unglamorous.

You don’t see many keynote speeches these days focused on streamlining accounts payable processes. But WebCenter is an unsung hero for even the most commonplace use case. WebCenter’s Image Processing and Records Management solutions have saved huge amounts of hard dollars for dozens of our clients by automating manually-intensive and error-prone processing tasks. Replacement of legacy and homegrown systems with an Oracle WebCenter solution, along with the ability to integrate WebCenter features with back-end systems of record, are the driving factors for achieving these benefits. One of the true industry experts in this field, Sam Harp, previously a long-time employee of Optika, Stellent, and Oracle, has been leading these types of implementations for more than 20 years.

Somewhere in the middle of the glamour curve falls the topic of web solution and mobile app security. It’s certainly a hot topic, but maybe not as glitzy as ‘the triad’. As employees push the adoption of mobile devices in the workplace for convenience and productivity gains, companies are aggressively implementing information security solutions to ensure that sensitive data is protected through every channel that it is being accessed. The good news for WebCenter customers is that Oracle’s Security Suite, Identity Management (IDM), is second-to-none in the industry. It provides everything from single-sign-on functionality all the way through fine-grained access control, an absolute must for regulated and compliance-heavy industries like Financial Services and Healthcare. Implementing security processes such as employee on-boarding and off-boarding and integrating with multiple directory and user profile repositories can be challenging undertakings. Working hand-in-hand with Oracle, aurionPro SENA’s IDM practice, winner of 2 of the last 4 Oracle Excellence Awards in IDM and led by Oracle Deputy CTO and aurionPro SENA President, Swapnil Mehta, ensures successful and secure mobile, content, portal, records management, and image processing implementations.

From the glamorous to the unglamorous, the dedicated WebCenter team at aurionPro SENA has seen it all. In fact, we were delighted to have been recognized for our depth of expertise as the honorable mention in the 2012 Oracle Excellence Award in the WebCenter Category. Here are a few WebCenter solutions of interest that we've built recently:

• ContentiD:  aurionPro SENA’s free WebCenter Content mobile app that allows organizations to securely search for and view documents, as well as review and process workflow assignments. All you need is network access to a WebCenter Content server and you’re up and running…there are no server components to install or customizations to make.
  

Download the app from Apple’s App Store here

• WebCenter Managed Services: Many customers who have asked us to host WebCenter solutions on their behalf often mistake that the “cloud” is the best path for them. Their real business challenge is to be able to focus their resources on core business objectives and less on complicated day-to-day IT tasks. We’ve built a mature, 24x7 system monitoring solution and a world-class service desk to help offload our clients’ costly and time-consuming support tasks. Some of our largest customers now trust us to manage their WebCenter solutions. Learn more here.
  

• Innovative Intranet : Hampered by an outdated intranet solution implemented on unsupported software, an industrial components manufacturer turned to aurionPro SENA to envision a secure and fresh new experience for their 100,000+ employees through the implementation of an Oracle WebCenter and Oracle IDM Proof of Concept.

• Business Expanding Extranet :  An entertainment services company wanted to provide better collaboration with production companies, studios, and employees in order to gain greater market share through improved relationships. aurionPro SENA helped them achieve their goals through the design and development of a WebCenter-based portal that facilitated electronic data input, replacing manually-intensive, paper-based processes and enabling document collaboration across their user communities.

• Physical Records Management Deployment : A home improvement retail chain needed to replace a homegrown records management system that drove barcoding, labeling, and storage management. aurionPro SENA helped them to implement WebCenter Content: Records to manage 65,000 boxes.

• Streamlined Accounts Payable Process: Inundated by a legacy, paper-driven invoicing process, an electrical services company needed to improve their Accounts Payable process. aurionPro SENA implemented WebCenter Imaging to achieve incredible efficiency gains and dramatically improve visibility into process bottlenecks.

If you’d like to learn more about any of our productized, pre-packaged, or consulting offerings, feel free to get in touch with two of our other long-term Stellent and Oracle experts, Mark Tepsic and Steven Sommer , or visit our website at aurionprosena.com .

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Today as the last entry for this week of our WebCenter Partners Week, we'll be hearing from a partner that has recently rebranded themselves. Element Solutions, formerly known as Element115 creates WebCenter Sites Solutions to enhance the Web Experience across multiple industries.

If you are just joining us today for the first time this week, you'll want to check out the past few days of posts from our partners, TekStream, FishBowl , Lingotek and Extended Content Solutions for some interesting reading and video views.

And for any of you WebCenter partners out there that are feeling left out - fear not - there is always room for you on the Oracle WebCenter Blog. We'd love to hear from you and feature your solutions to our readers in upcoming weeks. Contact me directly @ michael.snow@oracle.com  and we'll take care of you.

Note From The CEO Venkatesh Korla / CEO & Co-founder Our Rebrand: Beyond Healthcare

Since rebranding back in October we occasionally get asked, “Why did you rebrand and what does it mean?” Well the short answer is, the rebrand recognizes the growth and expanded services Element Solutions now offers. Founded in 2003, as Element115 we began as a CMS implementation and solution company developing a strong partnership with FatWire Software and primarily focused on the Healthcare industry. However, that focus shifted over the years as we expanded our solution offerings as well as our customer base beyond healthcare, serving global clients in retail, financial services, hospitality, and manufacturing. 2010 brought the opportunity to become a Pillar Partner with Oracle as a result of the FatWire acquisition. Since the launch of eHealth Accelerator in 2004 we have experienced accelerated growth in size and scope, and today are positioned as a strategic solution partner for many Global 1000 companies. Our offerings focus on strategic consulting and specialized services that support the customer online experience.

In renewing the brand, we seek to enable greater transparency and customer engagement across many industries. Our new tagline, “Powering Your Success” positions us as the synergistic connector that fuses our client’s business needs with software technology which ultimately surges our partners’ success as well. We strive to be the leading System Integrator for the WebCenter Sites platform and Web Experience Management across retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and services industries.

eSite Accelerator for WebCenter Sites

We are very excited to announce the launch of our flagship solution eSite Accelerator. The solution is a successful reference implementation framework, originally built for Oracle WebCenter Sites and developed to enhance the online customer experience, streamline the Web CMS planning, discovery, and implementation process, accelerate the launch cycle and cut costs.

More Info:

• eSite Accelerator for WebCenter Sites
• eSite Accelerator for Healthcare
  

Case Studies

Floyd Medical Center

Floyd Medical Center is a healthcare system serving Northwest Georgia and Northeast Alabama.

Challenges:

• Improve the Medical Center’s Web presence and intranet with more dynamic content and a modern look
• Current system required a full-time employee to maintain content and did not easily support multiple contributors
• Ability for Employees to access the Intranet from all the different centers and locations

Services / Solutions Provided:

• The Intranet was expanded and employees can now securely and conveniently access it from a standard browser, from their office or remotely
• Each department can now manage and create their own content allowing for less dependency on IT and Marketing
• Search and segmentation capabilities were improved enabling employees to find internal content more quickly

Read Oracle/Floyd Success Story

Pella

Pella Corporation offers a full range of energy-efficient windows and doors, including residential and commercial products for new construction, remodeling and replacement projects.

Challenges:

• Move the RTA, “Real Time Appointment Setting” application on to WebCenter Sites
• Add time slot management functionality
• Incorporate QAS address validation

Services/Solutions Provided:

• The RTA application is an appointment scheduler comprised of several HTML-based data input screens whose data, upon completion, are serialized into XML, and placed on a JMS queue where it is fed into the corporate CRM system
• Developed using the Oracle CSDT and SVN, which allowed the Element Solutions team and the Pella team to work both remotely and collaboratively
• Front end was built using AJAX, JSON and Jquery and supports all modern browsers

Read Oracle/Pella Success Story

Recent Launches

Wendy’s (wendys.com)

Phase I (called Release 1.0) of a planned 3 phase deployment of WebCenter Sites.

About Wendy’s

The Wendy’s Company (NASDAQ: WEN) is the world’s third largest quick-service hamburger company, with a market cap of 2.3 billion. The Wendy’s system includes more than 6,500 franchise and Company restaurants in the U.S. and 27 other countries and U.S. territories worldwide.

Wendy’s chose Oracle WebCenter Sites to replace their legacy implementation which had several short comings and issues.  Wendy’s Senior Management driven by Wendy’s IT and Marketing drove a sense of urgency to move this project as quickly as possible.  Element Solutions did a POC implementation followed by Discovery, Design, and eventually Development/Build phases.

Technical Highlights

• The system allows the content authors to manage and maintain promos, product images, and social content across various sections of the website.
• The system supports consumption of external data feeds via custom REST API Web Services using Jersey, for Products and Jobs which are directly managed by Wendy’s Architecture team.
• The system also supports AJAX based Web Service calls to dynamically provide Nutrition information, Location based services in Find It and Career Jobs, with MapQuest integration.
• Custom tree tabs
• The HTML/CSS/JS was provided by Resource (an external graphics design agency), which was integrated by our development team.
• The design supports internationalization with a English locale rollout at this stage.  Future rollouts will include other languages.

Holland America

This was Phase 1 of a planned 3 phase deployment of WebCenter Sites. Next phase details are in discussion.

With 139 years of experience, Holland America Line is recognized as the undisputed leader in the cruise industry’s premium segment. Holland America Line’s fleet of 15 ships offers more than 500 cruises to 350 ports in more than 100 countries, territories or dependencies. Two- to 110-day itineraries visit all seven continents and highlights include Antarctica, South America, Australia/New Zealand and Asia voyages; a Grand World Voyage; and popular sailings to ports in the Caribbean, Alaska, Mexico, Canada/New England, Europe and Panama Canal.

Holland chose WebCenter Sites to replace their failing Teamsite implementation which was constantly experiencing issues.  This drove a sense of urgency to advance this phase of the project as quickly as possible. 

Technical Highlights They are using WebCenter Sites to produce XML data for consumption by their systems. Their online booking system uses the XML data for generation of their booking website. Their online cruise and tour systems use the XML to generate all the documentation that accompanies a cruise booking or a shore excursion: www.hollandamerica.com then select cruise package which takes you to their booking sites:  book.hollandamerica.com and book.seaborn.com

• The data model is fully populated by ingestion of existing XML files and the Sites REST api
• There is a custom workflow including multiple publish points for QA and testing
• Includes a fully custom XML publishing Model
• Custom tree tabs
• Custom Delete option for xml Files

For more info on Element Solutions:  visit their website:www.elementsolutions.com

For more specific info on upgrades. Upgrades to WebCenter Sites


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Today as part of our WebCenter Partners Week, we'll be hearing from across the pond in the UK, where our partner, Extended Content Solutions creates WebCenter Solutions to enhance our customer's experiences.

If you are just joining us today for the first time this week, you'll want to check out the past few days of posts from our partners, TekStream, FishBowl and Lingotek for some interesting reading and video views.

And for any of you WebCenter partners out there that are feeling left out - fear not - there is always room for you at the Oracle WebCenter Blog. We'd love to hear from you and feature your solutions to our readers in upcoming weeks. Contact me directly @ michael.snow@oracle.com  and we'll take care of you.

Extended Content Solutions

Founded in 2000 Extended Content Solutions (ECS) are an Oracle Gold Partner and WebCenter Specialist based in the UK. We pride ourselves on understanding customer requirements and delivering the finest solutions. All our staff are actively encouraged to undertake Oracle specialization training and we have experience in all aspects of Oracle WebCenter including Sites, Portal, Content and bespoke ADF development.

How do you manage your Digital Assets?

ECS produce a number of full product solutions based on the WebCenter platform. One of these is MediaStore which provides Rich Media asset management for enterprises.

MediaStore utilizes the underlying functionality of the WebCenter platform and enhances it with enterprise features such as bulk uploads and approvals, collaboration areas, copyright control, embargoes and integration with Oracle ATG commerce and WebCenter Sites.

MediaStore is being used by a number of organizations in the UK where it has been extremely successful in;

• Reducing transport costs and project time by allowing third parties to share media and collaborate on new designs 
• Enforcing corporate logos and branding
• Reducing storage costs by providing a single repository for all digital assets
• Enhancing digital asset management capabilities of Oracle ATG commerce

MediaStore is available as an online trial just get in touch for details of how to access it. For more information about MediaStore features and customer success stories please see the MediaStore pages on our websites at http://www.extended-content.com/mediastore/.

Other products include Case Management, Scanning and Know Your Client (KYC) solutions all encompassing our unique and accessible user interfaces. For more information please see our website at http://www.extended-content.com

WebCenter for Financial Services

At ECS we recently completed a WebCenter Portal and Content implementation for the UK Fund Manager, CCLA. The results of this project have significantly reduced the time to process transactions, virtually eliminated paper from the processing team and saved costs by providing clear tracking of item status and ownership.

The CCLA implementation uses Oracle Document Capture (ODC) to scan mail items. These are then stored in WebCenter Content where they are indexed and validated including signature checking. Integration with Customer information allows transactions to be posted and reports are generated in Content for sending to Customers. WebCenter Portal is used to provide collaboration areas and dashboard overviews of item processing.

Videos describing the WebCenter implementation at CCLA are available below. 

CCLA Reduce Costs with Oracle Universal Content Management

CCLA Increase Efficiency with Oracle UCM

For more information about the use of WebCenter in CCLA and other case studies take a look at our website at http://www.extended-content.com/about-us/ecs-resources/ or contact us at info@extended-content.com or on +44 (0)1483 688 030.

ATTENTION WEBCENTER INNOVATORS!!!  YOU COULD WIN a FREE Pass to Oracle Open World 2013 in San Francisco!

Oracle WebCenter is part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family. So ... if you are you using Oracle Fusion Middleware (Oracle WebCenter) to deliver unique business value? If so, you can win a FREE pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2013 in San Francisco, California by submitting your nomination for the 2013 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation. Go to here for more details. Deadline for submission is June 18th, 2013.

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We're hitting our midweek stride with our week of Oracle WebCenter Partners. Don't forget to check out TekStream Solutions and FishBowl Solutions from earlier this week. Today, we'll feature one of our global Oracle WebCenter Partners, Lingotek with some great information in their guest post today as well as an upcoming webinar to learn even more.
LINGOTEK Use Case for a Global Company Using Oracle WebCenter  By Calvin Scharffs VP of Marketing @ Lingotek
Challenge With a presence in over 100 companies around the world, the global company needed to equip workers in all locations with customized, localized marketing messages, while providing headquarters with the ability to synchronize messages. The solution should be simple, scalable and cost-effective.   

Solution The global company launched a worldwide web site localization project with Lingotek Inside Oracle WebCenter that enabled the translation and localization of content into 16 languages, with room to scale. 

Benefits Translation and localization now happen in a matter of seconds rather than days. Expected ROI of more than 400 percent as a result of implementing Lingotek’s in-workflow translation technologies.
Managing Global Workflow The global company provides global customers with IT systems that are virtualized, automated, cloud-ready and sustainable. In addition to working with other global companies, the company itself has a presence all over the world, conducting business in more than 100 countries and regions. 

With such a large footprint, the company needed a way to communicate its corporate and product messages in a unified way to different regions. In order to provide its highly regarded storage virtualization services around the world and in many languages, the company needed a simple, cost-effective way to translate its content. 
The translation technology should be able to manage large amounts of data and automate workflows across a centralized system of record. Field workers in each country should have the resources they need in order to market the company’s products and services according to local culture and consumption patterns. The company had to simultaneously provide its corporate team with a centralized way to synchronize global messages. 
In order to accomplish these needs, which were to take place on a massive scale, the company embarked on a worldwide web site localization project. One of the key strategies in this effort was the translation and localization of content. The company wanted to start by translating its content into 16 languages, with the option of more as the company expanded into new countries.
Elaborate International Workflow Needs Professional translation services were not only expensive, but interrupted the company’s rapidly evolving translation workflow. The company produced a continuous stream of content with which translation services had to keep pace. The company content included everything from web site content to social media, and the company’s website content alone changed 50-100 times a month. 

With each new language the company added, its content would double. The company couldn’t afford to wait for professional translators. By the time the translated content arrived, it was already outdated.
Pure machine translation wouldn't work either. The company needed highly accurate translations that could adapt to the specifics of local languages and their unique nuances. It was extremely important to ensure that all contingents were saying the same things in the same ways, despite varying languages. This included ensuring that idioms and metaphors were translated appropriately so that they did not lose their meaning in the switch to a new language.
In-Workflow Translation Generates Real-Time Results The company selected Lingotek’s award-winning translation management system to continuously and automatically translate its global content, in real time. The company, already an Oracle WebCenter customer, benefitted from the fact that Lingotek’s translation platform is embedded in Oracle WebCenter. The company was able to localize its content for each of its global markets without leaving Oracle’s content management system. 


Lingotek enables the company to take advantage of several possible workflows. They are automatic machine translation, community (customer or employee-based) translation and professional translation. Together, these workflows enable seamless multilingual publishing, automatically and in real time. 
Infinite Scaling, Immediate Localization Lingotek’s automation kicks off translation workflow whenever the company’ corporate web site changes. This ensures that the company’ global sites are always synchronized, even though many incremental changes to content take place daily. Lingotek’s automation makes all translation fully scalable. 
In a boon to the company field teams worldwide, Lingotek’s community features allow for local input, localizing content in real time. Thanks to the community component, the company can add new languages without hiring additional people to help translate content. Moreover, Lingotek's interface in the field is extremely easy to use and also enables field teams to edit content as needed to be congruent with local customs. Immediate Quadrupling of ROI

By harnessing Lingotek’s unique ability to engage a community and publish translations in real-time, the company saved significant time and money. The company has empowered its corporate and global branches to reach out to specific audiences and markets with relevant content. The end result is an enhanced bottom line. The company expects a potential ROI of over 400 percent from the implementation of Lingotek's technology.

Join Us for a Webinar to Learn More
5 Steps to Open Your Website to a Global Audience with Oracle WebCenter Sites Wednesday, May 15, 2013 at 1:00 pm EST

Presenting your web content in a single language will limit your success. To build a global brand, businesses need to create a web experience that is accessible in many languages. Calvin Scharffs, Lingotek’s VP of Marketing, will demonstrate how to build a multilingual content presentation using Lingotek’s Global Web Experience Management solution, cloud-based software that utilizes Discovery, Analytics and Automation. Lingotek experts will show you how to manage a multilingual content Oracle WebCenter Sites site, synchronize the site’s content and manage changes in a continuous publishing model.
In this webinar, Calvin will walk you through the five steps needed to produce and maintain a multilingual website, including how to:

• Easily manage your multilingual sites
• Synchronize content and manage changes
• Translate content on the fly
• Use your community to translate
• When needed, professionally translate the content on your site

REGISTER TODAY

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As we continue our exploration of WebCenter Partners this week, today we will feature FishBowl Solutions, another fine example of a partner that is adding great value for WebCenter customers.

A disclaimer by necessity: a five day period is relatively short - so it is really impossible to feature all of our partners this week. If  you are a partner and feeling left out or a customer that doesn't see your favorite partner featured this week - don't give them grief about it - this is really only a subset of our larger partner community that responded to a quick ping for participation. If you are a partner reading this and have something interesting to add to the conversation for a future feature - please contact me @ michael.snow@oracle.com and we can add you to a future partner-focused week on WebCenter Social channels.

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Fishbowl Solutions has been working with Oracle WebCenter customers since 2010 to extend WebCenter Content to mobile devices. We started working with mobile sales force enablement and have since extended our offerings to meet expanding customer needs. We are excited to announce the release of our newest mobile app, FishbowlToGo.

FishbowlToGo was developed in response to the growing number of customers looking for a way to easily access WebCenter Content and perform basic content management actions from a smart phone. A lot of the organizations we’ve talked to are fighting off ad-hoc adoption of Dropbox or other consumer document management solutions that provide a mobile delivery channel outside the enterprise infrastructure and without the security of WebCenter. FishbowlToGo provides much of the familiar functionality found on these consumer apps within the WebCenter platform.

FishbowlToGo is publically available for iPhone and Android. Any WebCenter Customer can download the app for free and install it on their phone. The free version lets you search for and view content from the Oracle WebCenter Content repository including documents, images, and multimedia. You can also view your workflow queue and set commonly-used items as favorites to quickly access them again. To get started, simply download the app using the links below or search “FishbowlToGo” from the app store – no component or administrator setup is required.

Fishbowl also offers a premium version of the app, which requires a server-side component and provides more robust content management capabilities. With FishbowlToGo Premium, users can review and approve workflow items as well as check in content from their phones. The premium component enables users to pick from configurable upload types such as notes, photos, invoices, etc., and check in those items without filling out lengthy check-in forms from their phones.

FishbowlToGo helps WebCenter customers increase the value of their Oracle WebCenter system by extending content management capabilities to convenient and familiar mobile channels while retaining benefits like consistent access to the up-to-date versions and a secure content repository.

Besides FishbowlToGo, Fishbowl also offers a tablet-based Mobile Library app. We recently did a webinar on this app; for a video recap check out “Inside the Fishbowl” below from our YouTube channel. The full webinar recording is also available. Fishbowl worked with Banner Engineering to deploy this app to iPads and Android tablets last year. Banner recently presented their solution at Collaborate13. The presentation and whitepaper can be found on the Fishbowl Solutions Collaborate13 page. For additional information on this and other mobile solutions for Oracle WebCenter Content visit the links below or email info@fishbowlsolutions.com.

Additional Information

• FishbowlToGo for iPhone on iTunes
• FishbowlToGo for Android on Google Play
• FishbowlToGo Web Page
• Fishbowl Solutions Website

 

 

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WebCenter Partners Near and Far:

The Oracle ecosystem of partners and alliances is vast and wide on a global scale. Within our WebCenter family, we have a rich diversity of partners offering additional value to help our customers get the most from their technology investments. As we all know - there is so much more beyond just the technology acquisition that leads to success for each implementation.

With this in mind, we've decided to spend this coming week taking a deeper look at a handful of our WebCenter partners. In the realm of blog-time, a five day period is relatively short - so if your favorite partner isn't featured this week - don't give them grief about it - this is really only a subset of our larger partner community that responded to a quick ping for participation. If you are a partner reading this and have something interesting to add to the conversation for a future feature - please contact me @ michael.snow@oracle.com and we can add you to a future partner-focused week on WebCenter Social channels.

TekStream Solutions

TekStream Solutions is an Atlanta-based technology solutions company that specializes in addressing the company-wide IT problems faced by enterprise businesses, such as consolidating and streamlining disparate content and application delivery systems and the market challenges to create “anytime, anywhere access” to data for employees, partners and customers. TekStream’s IT consulting solutions combined with its specialized IT recruiting expertise helps businesses increase efficiencies, streamline costs and remain competitive in an extremely fast-changing market. We are an Oracle Gold Partner specializing in the sales, deployment, resourcing and service of the Oracle WebCenter suite. Our mission is to use our extensive IT experience to deliver tangible business results enabling our clients to profit from the advanced use of technology. We strive to build long-term client relationships based on a shared vision for success and a relentless focus on quality delivery to exceed our client’s expectations.  
As we adapt to customer demand and solve the most valuable challenges Oracle customers face, we are happy to officially announce the launch of our new services aimed at improving the customer experience by leveraging the most complete portfolio of portal, web experience management, content, social, and collaboration technologies: Oracle WebCenter

1)    CloudStream:

TekStream’s experts discuss the complex, and extremely rewarding, next generation Oracle Cloud solutions.  Learn how TekStream’s proven methodology quickly and efficiently provides cloud-based solutions for the Oracle WebCenter Content, Imaging, Sites, and Portal family of products. Based on a world-class hosting service, CloudStream provides customers with turnkey content and information solutions delivering intelligent performance, ease of use and ease of management, and a rapid return on investment. Dig into the details and learn the top 5 value-added tips and tricks on how to significantly reduce your innovation debt while giving your company the tools and time it needs to scale. Imagine a world where your data migrations, managed services, upgrade implementations, and hosting services work in perfect harmony.  That’s the best WebCenter experience at the lowest cost. That’s CloudStream.

2)    TekStream University:

Customers engaging with TekStream University can be assured that they will receive professional and effective instruction on the Oracle WebCenter stack of products while having access to consultants who have hands-on best practices to supplement our training agenda. Available onsite, at a National training facility, or in the Virtual classroom, our consultants/trainers average over 10 years of experience in their given product expertise and are eager to share that wealth of knowledge with TekStream clients. TekStream’s experience, complemented with TekStream University’s streamlined standard training materials (including a course manual, PowerPoint presentations, and hands-on labs), ensures that students receive practical instruction that can be directly applied to their own environments.
TekStream University Datasheet

3)    WebCenter Content Connector

Oracle customers seeking to deploy WebCenter Portal (WCP) and Spaces utilizing WebCenter Content (WCC) as the foundation for easily accessing content have been faced with the dilemma of using an older version of Contribution Folders aka Folders_g, from WCC. FrameWork Folders is a long-awaited upgrade to Folders_g, providing scalability and new features. As of the current release of WCP/Spaces and WCC, there is no out-of-the-box support for WCP/Spaces to utilize the FrameWork Folders’ capabilities. TekStream has created a connector application which now allows WCP/Spaces environments to maximize the potential of content integrations with WCC utilizing FrameWork Folders.
WebCenter Content Connector Datasheet

4)    WebCenter Imaging Upgrade

Customers currently deployed on Optika, Stellent, or Oracle Imaging and Process Management (I/PM) solutions are quickly coming to terms that their existing applications have become outdated. Optika/Stellent/Oracle I/PM customers should look to enhance and expand their I/PM solutions by upgrading to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g, which has been updated to include mission-critical features that improve usability and functionality. TekStream provides Stellent and Oracle UCM customers with an upgrade path designed to limit the risks of data loss, loss of functionality, and reduce the overall impact to the organization that comes from large-scale upgrades.
WebCenter Imaging Upgrade Datasheet

5)    ResCare Case Study

Our client is a leading North America human services and support provider, serving more than a million people each year, at over 1,000 locations across the country. They provide residential, therapeutic, job training and educational support to people with developmental and other disabilities. Our client also provides these services to seniors who need in-home assistance, to youth with specials needs, and to adults who are experiencing barriers to employment. Our client’s business has continued to grow through organic growth and acquisition and now has annual revenue over $2B and operating their services on a national level.

TekStream resources led the requirements, design, development, testing, deployment, and post-implementation effort to streamline the high-volume invoice handling process through the automation of paper and email-based input channels, leveraging Oracle’s WebCenter Imaging, Document Capture, Forms Recognition, and EBusiness Suite Accelerator. These enterprise level tools provide an integrated solution for customers using Oracle’s EBusiness Suite solution to eliminate paper-based routing and storage, enable automated and electronic workflow approvals, reduce manual data entry of invoice information and provide visibility into the overall Accounts Payable process. In addition, this solution is capable of being used for other business processes and is supporting our client in automating their Oracle iExpense solution be providing electronic imaging for expense report receipts and in the automation of their Capital Expense approval process by automating the imaging, routing and approval of multiple documents associated with approving large scale projects.
ResCare Case Study

6)    WCC 11g Upgrade

Oracle WebCenter Content (WCC) provides industry-leading document management and records management services designed to support the most demanding enterprise. In today’s environments, organizations have multiple content management systems deployed. Most of these were purchased to support specific department needs while others are older systems that are no longer supported. WCC provides a robust content management platform that can support organizations down to the department level while providing the enterprise consistency needed to drive business at a macro level. TekStream provides strategic Services to assist companies in streamlining their content management consolidation, migration, and upgrade efforts to Oracle WCC 11g.
WCC 11g Upgrade Datasheet

7)    QuickStream Methodology

QuickStream is a four to six week service engagement aligning business stakeholders and IT organizations before a project begins; the insight provided helps organization avoid the negative business outcomes of IT project failures due to unmet quality, cost, and time expectations. QuickStream provides organizations with the tools and materials necessary for successful implementations, including:

•    Prioritized Requirements
•    High-level Technical Design, including Hardware/Software Architecture
•    Phase 1 Detailed Project Plan including Resource, Cost, and Time Estimate

QuickStream saves you the time and hassle of doing the work yourself, and gives your resources the room they need to focus on growing your business. Rest assured that TekStream offers committed and professional resources to see your project to completion and achieve excellent results.
QuickStream Datasheet

Media:

Datasheet: TekStream Company Datasheet

“TekStream - Service, Support, Software, & Sourcing”

Webinar:  WebCenter Interaction to WebCenter Portal Migration Planning

As Premier Support services come to an end for AquaLogic Interaction (ALUI) and WebCenter Interaction (WCI), now is the time to plan your migration from these legacy platforms to the WebCenter Portal platform.  While ALUI and WCI platforms have provided a long-standing portal solution over the past decade, they can no longer be considered modern portal platforms; and often leave behind an infrastructure that is heavily dependent on their feature set and functionality.  Planning a migration from these systems to Oracle's WebCenter Portal and/or WebCenter Spaces requires a proven methodology that leverages experience with both sides of the equation: this is neither the time nor the project to learn on one's feet.  In this webcast, learn how to approach and what to expect from a WCI to WebCenter Portal or Spaces migration from the TekStream Solutions migration team.  Learn More:  http://marketing.tekstream.com/wci_wcp_webinar

If you’re interested in learning how TekStream is perfectly positioned to help you achieve your goals, contact us at Info@TekStream.com or at www.tekstream.com.

Social. Mobility. Context awareness. Nontraditional content. User experience. Consumerization. This confluence of trends is creating unprecedented opportunities but also unprecedented exposure and risk.

This year's Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit provided attendees the opportunity to learn how to exploit these trends now, as to not fall behind better positioned competitors. The Gartner PCC Summit delivered the tools and insights needed to tap into unprecedented portals, content and collaboration opportunities. Disruptive trends are yielding an array of business-critical imperatives: Deliver secure access across a widening range of devices. Mine and leverage nontraditional content. Use social software to drive efficiency and innovation. Exploit context-aware computing.

This summit represented the single most important event in the portals, content and collaboration space, where IT and business leaders gathered to learn from the latest Gartner research and interact with 24+ Gartner analysts, peers and solution leaders. We had a great week in San Diego, and we were able to experience new research and innovative thinking in a variety of session formats that drilled down to some of the most critical industry topics and trends.

Oracle was proud to be a Silver sponsor of the show this year, with a breakfast session given by Josh Lannin, Senior Director of Product Management for WebCenter and a booth on the show floor. Did you attend the Gartner PCC Summit this year? What were your thoughts or reactions?

 It's fitting this week that we are focusing around social collaboration, since the key buzzwords at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit have been social, mobile, cloud and information. As the event comes to a close, John Brunswick shares his best practices for social collaboration adoption and how you can see the best results when implementing social technologies.

Want to get the most from your social collaboration investments?  If you already have or are contemplating investment in this technology, consider the following to boost your social collaboration adoption.

1. Drive Awareness - Your line of business leaders hold the key to success.  Ideally they proactively request this type of tooling in support of an existing use case, but that is rare.  If you are looking to drive adoption, hold a lunch and learn and using "business speak" share external case studies and focus on capabilities - instead of product functions.
2. Deploy Within an Existing Process - Start viewing social collaboration more along the lines of process management.  Identify "unstructured" processes with definitive start and end points that exist today.  Social collaboration deployed to resolve challenges with existing unstructured business process are most likely to succeed.
3. Require a Strong "Why" - Ensure that rationale for a given social collaboration use is justified.  Address this upfront, as the actual use - or lack of use - of your deployment will objectively confirm if the "why" was compelling enough.
4. Focus on Low Friction Experience - Regardless of the quality of your underlying technology, it needs to be easily accessible for end users.  Success occurs when use takes place within existing flows of work, without additional need for login, frequent context and window switching.
5. Avoid "Just Because"  - Social collaboration is a spice, not the main dish.  Keep in mind that social collaboration is most impactful in the context of business entities and existing work flows.  Social collaboration works when it is "purpose driven".

This year's Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit highlights opportunities for organizations to harness the nexus of social, mobile, information and cloud capabilities.  According to Gartner, "The forces combine to empower individuals as they interact with each other and their information through well-designed ubiquitous technology."

How does this nexus impact an organization's ability to support their business goals?  It is fair to say that these forces have been present in various formats for some time now? So what has changed? Upon attending sessions opening day of the conference yesterday, we find that speed, agility and availability emerge as consistent threads.  Specifically, we see the speed of solution delivery, communication agility within and across channels, and the availability of analytical insight are all present.
In many markets where products and services between vendors are comparable, key business differentiators will be tied to comprehensive engagement throughout the lifecycle of a relationship with a prospect or customer.  Without an investment in the consistent alignment of technical choices with the vision for the business strategy, discrete technical solutions can end up ultimately posing roadblocks.
Why is mobile computing considered disruptive?  It potentially shines light onto an organization's ability to expose their back office systems outwardly in a secure, contextually relevant way.  It implicitly shows the level of investment that organizations supply to align their information technology with their business vision.
Gartner highlights the forces within the nexus as "well-designed ubiquitous technology".  Considering well-designed in a holistic manner, outside of a discrete solution, capabilities that IT potentially needs to supply to the business to support initiatives like customer self-service require the knowledge of user profiles, single views of a customer and connectivity with various systems to support self-service activity.  Within the first phase of a particular mobile or self-service project, these aspects may not pose an issue, but to meet a future state, business vision may call for functionality to be included that prior decisions may render costly and complicated to deliver.
The nexus of social, mobile, information and cloud capabilities offer unprecedented opportunity to expedite and optimize delivery.  Organizations that will extract the most value from the nexus will do so by leveraging enterprise architecture practices to achieve long-term agility, making technology choices in line with principles that ensure the delivery of value beyond discrete technical solutions.  This allows organizations to then focus on business innovation, engaging with their customers and prospects, and outmaneuvering their competition, through the use of a technical foundation carefully aligned to support business innovation.
Are you attending the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in San Diego, this week? Oracle is proud to be a Silver sponsor, with a 30 minute breakfast session this morning at 7:00am given by Joshn Lannin, Senior Director of Product Management Oracle WebCenter. We also have a booth on the show flow, so we hope you’ll come find us to discuss the nexus of social, mobile, information and cloud capabilities!

Today’s guest blog post was written by Stephen Schleifer. Stephen is Senior Principal Product Manager for Oracle’s Web Content Management (WCM) solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites.

It’s no secret that the WCM market has gone through a series of rapid changes over the past five years or so, in part because the business objectives driving the use of these systems evolved (from content publishing to online experience), and in part due to the changing nature and role of corporate websites, or brand sites. We are now living in a multichannel world -- with the rise of social networks, increased use of campaign marketing (including social media, email marketing and promotional microsites), and of course, the fact that more people are accessing the web via mobile devices than ever before. All of this has amounted to added complexity for web marketers to manage their brand and message across all these channels, but it has also changed the perception of what role a brand site, and by way of it, a WCM system, is supposed to play in online marketing.

While most still agree that a brand site is an important place for customers to acquire information about a company’s products and services, others propose that as more traffic and leads are generated through alternate channels that they should become the main focus of online marketing and customer engagement efforts.

I would argue that it’s not an either/or proposition, but instead what’s needed more often than not is a more blended approach, and in fact, your brand site should serve as the centralized point of your online marketing strategy. Why? Because it’s the one place where all these channels tend to converge -- it’s the glue that holds your brand and message together across all these diverse customer touch points. Linking these channels back to your brand site is also important because it’s the place where you control the message, and it’s ultimately where you can engage customers in more dynamic ways, as the experience you create there is entirely of your own making.

WCM systems are the technology set that provides the tools for marketers to manage corporate web sites, and they are unique in their ability to support a wide variety of cross-channel online marketing value propositions; these include:

– Extending the reach of / re-purposing content between brand sites and social media: For example, by enabling site visitors to engage in interactions around site content and then extend the reach of that content by sharing it to their walls. Or by repurposing content on your site such as articles, blog posts or promotional offers for publishing on social media pages. Conversely, many organizations are choosing to host promotional or educational video on social video sites such as YouTube, but then integrate those videos within the context of brand site pages as streaming content. All this can be facilitated by a WCM system.

– Seamlessly adapting brand site content for delivery though the mobile channel: Mobile has been a difficult channel for marketers to master, but we’re at the point where technologies like HTML-5 and approaches like responsive design where effective mobile web experience has become a reality, as you can now design once for your branding site, and have those templates instantly adapted and optimized for mobile delivery. While this is not the only effective approach to mobile web (depending on your business objectives, you may indeed want to develop mobile templates or mobile-specific sites), most WCM systems are now flexible enough to support multiple approaches.

– Integrating websites with email marketing for cross-channel marketing automation: Bringing together WCM and email marketing makes a lot of sense, because the better the two work together, the more consistent, targeted and effective your online campaigns will be. Both systems leverage content such as text and images that will need to be duplicated or adapted across channels for web landing pages, email blasts, etc. -- the more you can centralize the management of that content for more effective cross-channel publishing, the more you can be sure that your branding and message will be consistent and clear to your customer. Both systems also require some level of personalization to ensure that the various customer segments in a campaign are spoken to with a relevant message – and whether it’s being featured in an email or somewhere on your site, that message must remain the same. Integrating the customer segment data that is being captured in your WCM system with that in your marketing campaign system (not to mention CRM) is key to be able to provide a unified profile across these customer-facing touch points, and in turn can help to ensure more effective targeting.

Whatever role you decide is best for your corporate website to play in your online marketing mix, there is no escaping that it continues to be as relevant as ever in today’s multi-channel world. Think of it as a kind of digital hub for online experience, and your WCM system is the backbone for creating and managing engaging, cross-channel experiences. 

On its own, Oracle WebCenter Sites provides organizations with powerful capabilities for engaging sites visitors with personalized, interactive, multichannel experiences on their marketing websites. But for companies that are ready to embrace the power of predictive decisionsing or who are ready to start integrating different online touch points into a seamless and connected experience, Oracle's customer experience solutions can offer even more. Let's take a look at how a few of these customer experience solutions combine with Oracle WebCenter Sites.

Oracle WebCenter Sites + Oracle Real-Time Decisions

Oracle’s web experience management solution, WebCenter Sites, already includes robust capabilities for marketer managed segmentation and targeting, however, a whole new level of optimization can be achieved by combining WebCenter Sites with Oracle’s decision management solution, Real-Time Decisions. Using the power of statistical data models and historical and real-time analytics, Real-Time Decisions automates what would otherwise be the manual task of sifting through volumes of customer data, determining likely and potential customer segments, and determining the best content to present to a given site visitor. As customer interactions take place, Real-Time Decisions continuously refines its data models, automatically adjusting and learning over time to achieve the optimal content selection for each site visitor. Marketers have multiple levels of control when using Real-Time Decisions. They can opt for full automation and let Real-Time Decisions handle all decision making. In this case, Real-Time Decisions infers segmentation and uses automation to make decisions about what content to display to the site visitor. Or, marketers can opt for a more controlled approach and specify performance goals that will help steer the Real-Time Decisions model in the direction of desired business objectives such as maximizing revenue or maximizing conversions. Together, Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Real-Time Decisions provide marketers with the ability to determine the best approach for realizing their segmentation and targeting objectives, whether that means managing the process manually or by instituting some level of automation

Oracle WebCenter Sites + Oracle Endeca

If you’re a business that has a large product catalog, integrating faceted search into the web experience can be an effective way for potential customers to dynamically explore your site and find relevant and desired items more quickly and easily. During the product selection process, site visitors want the ability to navigate based on their own unique preferences and to view content and search results that are most relevant to them. Often, the search experience on a website frustrates potential buyers or provides them with too many irrelevant results to wade through. A solution such as Oracle Endeca Guided Search can be integrated with your WebCenter Sites deployment to optimize the search capabilities on your web presence, so you can deliver more precise, more relevant, and more complete results that help guide and influence product selection, leading to increased conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Oracle WebCenter Sites + Oracle ATG Web Commerce

If your business model includes an eCommerce component, speeding and simplifying the purchase process is critical. A streamlined and efficient online purchase process is vital to preventing shopping cart abandonment. The purchase process can even become another opportunity for engaging customers and influencing them to purchase more or related products; it can also be structured to incentivize customers to take action now through the offer of various promotions. Oracle’s ATG Web Commerce is a top ranked commerce solution that enables you to deliver an engaging and efficient online buying experience. When combined with Oracle WebCenter Sites, these solutions bring together best-in-class web experience management and ecommerce capabilities, assuring that your site visitors have a personalized, interactive, and multichannel experience as make their way through the customer journey.

Oracle WebCenter Sites + Oracle WebCenter Portal

For some business models, online self-service is the primary channel through which business is conducted. In others, online self-service represents an opportunity to lower the cost to serve by migrating customers from high cost customer service channels to the more cost-effective online channel. Oftentimes, in industries like financial services, healthcare, or even government, you’ll want to provide your customers, patients, or constituents with both a public online presence where they can find information and engage with your organization early in the customer journey, and also an online self-service presence that enables your customers to access secure services where they can conduct financial transactions, look up personal health information or take advantage of government services. In cases like this, the combination of Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle WebCenter Portal is ideally suited to helping you meet both of these objectives and ultimately deliver an online experience that is unified, consistent and seamless as those visiting your web presence evolve from prospects into active customers.

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On Demand Webcast: How to Connect the Online Customer Experience by Combining Oracle WebCenter Sites with Other Oracle CX Solutions

Are you providing your customers with the best possible browsing, shopping and search experiences across all your marketing and commerce websites? Successful organizations must deliver an engaging online experience that is personalized, interactive and consistent across all phases of the customer journey from research to selection to support and follow on purchases. Attend this Webcast to learn how WebCenter Sites can help you:

• Unify the online customer experience by bringing together best-in-class web experience management, eCommerce, and faceted search capabilities
• Encourage social interaction by incorporating ratings, comments, reviews and social sharing capabilities into your web presence
• More easily ingest content feeds from your suppliers and simplify the management of high volumes of detailed product information
  

View the webcast.
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In today’s socially enabled, multichannel online world, individuals increasingly expect their online experiences to be targeted specifically to their interests, to be as social and interactive as their social networking experiences and to be optimized for whatever device type they choose whether a PC, tablet or mobile phone. For Web marketers, this new imperative presents a unique set of challenges when it comes to engaging with their customers online.
Oracle WebCenter Sites helps organizations meet the new Web experience management (WEM) imperative:

Oracle WebCenter Sites enables organizations to deliver a highly relevant and personalized online experience to their customers using intuitive segmentation and targeting capabilities. This allows organizations to deliver the right content to the right site visitor at the right time, maximizing up-sell and cross-selling opportunities while creating an experience that fosters loyalty.

With Oracle WebCenter Sites, organizations can make the experience on the corporate web presence as interactive and community oriented as the experience on social networks. They can also tap into the power of social networks for extending the visibility of their brand and leverage social endorsements to influence purchasing decisions.  User-generated content such as ratings, reviews, comments and polls can be easily incorporated into the web presence.  Social login and social sharing capabilities make it easy for site visitors to contribute user-generated content using their familiar social network ID’s. Content that site visitors like can be easily shared with their social networks in just a few clicks.

Oracle WebCenter Sites also helps organizations solve some of the challenges of multichannel delivery so they can successfully engage site visitors across online channels.  Oracle WebCenter Sites enables centralized management of traditional web and mobile sites.  The online experience can be easily optimized for delivery to thousands of mobile phone and tablets so organizations can engage mobile users more effectively.

Check out the video to see what it's like to experience WebCenter Sites as a site visitor:

Another important focus area of WebCenter Sites is empowering businesses to create and manage engaging online customer experiences on an enterprise scale.

In order to compete effectively and to get online initiatives to market as quickly as possible, marketers and other non-technical business users need the ability to take greater control of the creation and management of the online customer experience. To enable this, WebCenter Sites has transformed the marketing user experience so that site authoring is visual, intuitive and designed for the way that marketers want to work today. When it comes to web authoring in WebCenter Sites, what marketers see is what marketers get.

Capabilities such as comments, reviews, ratings and blogs are integral to engaging site visitors today. Additionally this kind of user-generated content enables visitors to recommend and endorse an organization to others – an invaluable marketing tool in today’s world.  But user-generated content requires some level of moderation and control to safeguard the integrity of the brand.  Oracle WebCenter Sites provides deep, yet simple to use moderation capabilities so that organizations can assure that the dialogue around their brand is a constructive one.

Assuring optimal performance across enterprise web deployments is a critical component of the online customer experience. With Oracle WebCenter Sites, organizations can deliver a highly scalable multisite, multilingual, and multimedia online customer experience. They can execute on a global scale without sacrificing performance. Oracle WebCenter Sites assures rapid, dynamic delivery of high-volume sites, streamlines the management of hundreds of sites, makes it possible to manage vast and complex product catalogs with ease, and seamlessly incorporates digital assets into the online experience through rich media management.

See what it's like to be a marketer using WebCenter Sites to create engaging online customer experiences:

We all have certain pet peeves about what we experience as customers.  One of mine is the all too common experience of calling a customer service line, waiting an interminable amount of time for an actual human to get on the phone, providing the agent with my account information, describing my problem to that agent, and then being transferred to yet another agent because the first one can’t address my problem. Invariably, this next agent asks me to once again provide my account information and once again describe my problem.  Why isn’t this information communicated to the next rep in the chain so I don’t have to waste my time and repeat myself?  Or better yet, why isn’t that first line rep empowered to help me in the first place.

Many of you may be familiar with “Mind the Gap,” the omnipresent signage in the London Underground that advises subway passengers to take extra care as they cross the gap between the train and the platform.  “Mind the Gap” has even become such a part of London’s iconography that you’ll often find it plastered on t-shirts or other souvenirs. The idea behind “Mind the Gap” is to raise risk awareness among passengers so accidents can be prevented, the Tube can run smoothly and riders can go safely about their business. The call center experience I describe above is riddled with what I consider “customer experience gaps” – little landmines that exist between various touch points and channels of interaction where the risk of customer dissatisfaction is high if care is not taken to make these engagements connected, consistent and meaningful. All too often, businesses fail to “mind the gaps” in their customer experience and allow them to become a source of customer pain, frustration or flight.

In recent years, customer experience gaps have only become more plentiful. When I need to make a purchase, my customer journey can take me many places: to a search engine, to a corporate website, to Facebook, or to a store. I may interact with sales people, customer service reps, and other people in my community or in my social network.  Sometimes I gather information on my desktop in my office, or on my iPad from the comfort of my sofa, or from my fantastic new smart phone which is with me pretty much everywhere.   And as I go about my customer journey with a particular brand, I often observe the lack of connection between the various touch points and that’s because many organizations are failing to “mind the gaps” in their customer experience.

In my opinion, these failures aren’t necessarily intentional. If fact, I think organizations are under more and more pressure to “mind the gaps” and get the customer experience right.  Maybe that’s why 22% of respondents in Oracle’s recent Global Customer Experience Survey said that improving the cross-channel experience is the top priority of their organizations’ customer experience program over the next twelve months. One of the problems, however, is that most companies have created systems to address most of these channels and touch points, but they’ve often created them independently, making it difficult to maintain consistent and meaningful interactions with a customer. What companies need to do is examine the infrastructure supporting the customer experience and move away from having these disjointed silos that create customer experience gaps. Oracle can help get you there.  How well are you minding the gaps in your customer experience?

On Demand Webcast: SunPower Unifies the Online Customer Experience with Oracle WebCenter Sites

SunPower has been developing solar technology since the 1970s and is the global leader in developing high-efficiency solar solutions for homes, businesses and governments, commercial buildings and utilities. SunPower was looking to transform their existing global Website to a more contextually relevant, targeted and interactive online experience for their customers. In order to do so, SunPower turned to Oracle WebCenter Sites and teamed up with Oracle partner, Capgemini, to unify the online experience and optimize customer engagement. Watch the webcast to learn how.

Join us on Thursday, April 18th at 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific to learn about the 7 ways Content and the proper use of ECM can help improve the overall health of your business. We hope to see you then! 

Our thoughts and prayers are with all those affected by the bombings at the Boston Marathon.
- the WebCenter team.