Delivering exceptional web experiences

IBM Software Cross-Industry
Delivering exceptional
web experiences
IBM Web Content Manager

Delivering exceptional web experiences
1 2 3 4 5Create and Target and
Introduction design Collaborate optimize Resources
Create exceptional web Improve productivity Get more from your Help increase revenue, Learn more about
experiences that are per- with enhanced func- team with serial and market share and brand IBM Customer
sonalized and that drive tionality that helps you parallel workﬂows, audit awareness by designing Experience Suite and
revenue, increase loyalty, create and publish trails, and other features and implementing how you can leverage
improve satisfaction and multilingual content that boost collaboration targeted campaigns IBM Web Content
reduce costs. Manage all and engaging social during the content cre- across multiple chan- Manager.
of these moving parts to websites. Speed time to ation process. nels. Maximize invest-
keep on budget and value with prebuilt tem- ments and improve
launch on schedule. plates for microsites, conversion rates with
blogs and wikis, includ- analytics integration
ing industry-speciﬁc support and reporting
templates. capabilities.

3
1 Introduction 2 Create & Design 3 Collaborate 4 Target & Optimize 5 Resources
Introduction
Day 1: the task at hand
Trina Washburn is new to Acme
Corporation and she has been given what
seems like an impossible job.
Two weeks. That’s all she has. The board of
Acme Corporation has approved a partner-
ship deal with Bronson Corporation.
Bronson and Acme will be joining forces
with a combined product offering that
could mean millions in revenue for both
companies—and the ball is in her court.
Trina is on point to deliver the web experi-
ence that is key to the success of the
partnership—the experience has to drive
revenue, increase brand loyalty, improve
satisfaction—and she isn’t sure where
to start.
There are dozens of things that have to get
done before her CEO and the CEO of
Bronson announce the deal in two weeks—
graphics, content, images, copywriting,
social media integration. And it has to be
great.
Figure 1: Back of the napkin wireframe.

4
Business requirements
First, Trina receives the business require-
ments from her product management team.
They need a new microsite for the new
products. The microsite must work seam-
lessly with back-end office services and be
accessible from the Acme corporate site
and from the Bronson site. The content
needs to be branded as Bronson Products
when users come from Bronson’s site and
as Acme Products when they arrive from
Acme’s site. Content must be tailored for
all the key players—manufacturers, the
media, distributors and others. And it must
be optimized for search to establish Acme’s
position with their selected keywords
before competitors get a chance to
respond. And, naturally, she has a limited
budget.
Trina gathers her team and they translate
the business requirements into a list of key
web objectives:
● Create a highly functional and effective
website that wows its users
● Tailor product messages for each of our
target audiences
● Launch concurrently in all marketplaces
● Establish top search engine rankings for
our chosen keywords
● Convey consistency in our messaging
and brand values through all channels
● Build a buzz—get users engaged in
commenting/blogging/rating/networking
● Understand user behavior on the site so
we can adjust quickly as necessary
● Launch the site—FAST!
Trina turns to her team: “Now how can we
make this happen?”
A seasoned veteran on the Acme IT team
speaks ﬁrst, “No problem. We just updated
our web content management solution with
IBM Web Content Manager software. It’s
part of the IBM Customer Experience Suite.
We can do this.”

5
What is IBM Web Content Manager
software?
IBM Web Content Manager software can
help you more easily create content, target
individuals with relevant content and opti-
mize content delivery on your website—plus
so much more. IBM Web Content Manager
software enhances the web experience by
bringing together the key capabilities and
functionality people expect, including new
and improved social features, enhanced
content support, improved search and
search engine optimization capabilities,
simpliﬁed editing and publishing of digital
media, and integration with rich internet
applications such as Adobe® Flash
software.
Comprehensive and agile, IBM Web
Content Manager software helps organiza-
tions quickly and easily create rich and
dynamic websites, respond to ever-
changing customer demands and expecta-
tions, and boost customer satisfaction.
Figure 2: IBM Web Content Manager home page.

6
IBM Web Content Manager software can
help you create an engaging and rewarding
web experience that spans multiple chan-
nels—smart phones, websites and social
sites. The software’s robust features and
functionality also help you do more with
your website content to help increase brand
awareness and proﬁtability.
IBM Web Content Manager software deliv-
ers powerful capabilities:
● An easy-to-use creation and editing inter-
face to help increase productivity
● Enhanced authoring forms to support
easy content creation
● Optimized publishing and change man-
agement for projects
● Enhanced analytics integration support
to help you understand user behavior and
improve conversion rates
● Tags, ratings, and improved blogs and
wikis to harness the expertise of user
communities
● Enhanced website templates to help
speed time to value
● Simpliﬁed roundtrip content editing
through integration with IBM Lotus
Symphony™ software
● Virtualization support for platform
optimization
● Serviceability enhancements to help
lower cost of ownership
With a comprehensive set of authoring,
editing, sharing, designing, management
and delivery features, along with powerful
analytics integration support that enables
you to better understand visitor behavior,
you can transform your website’s most
important component—its content.

7
Create
Web content management, an
introduction
At Trina’s last company, content creation
was highly dependent on IT. IT had to go
into each individual HTML page on the
company’s website to make changes. So a
simple edit might have to be repeated on
20 different pages, leading to increased
chances of error. The process left content
owners frustrated by their inability to deploy
changes in a timely manner. Without the
resources to deploy changes quickly and
with business requirements that were not
always clearly communicated, IT was often
put in a precarious position.
With these things in mind, Trina is worried
that the operational costs of implementing
the content according to the business
requirements could drive the project over
budget. Content owners need to be
empowered to manage the delivery of
dynamic content and rich media through
multiple channels without spending an inor-
dinate amount of time on content entry. At
Acme, the process of web content man-
agement (WCM) is already ingrained in all
its processes, so Trina has nothing to worry
about.
At its most basic level, WCM separates the
process of creating content—the writing,
editing, revising and approval processes
around content—from the presentation of
the content. Content authors create, edit
and deploy content through an intuitive user
interface that enables the information to be
reused across the website in different con-
texts and for different purposes. IT creates
design components and templates that are
used by the content authors. IT becomes
responsible for administering the applica-
tion, managing the environments, and occa-
sionally creating new design components or
templates.

8
Create (continued)
Reusable fragments
Web content is made up of many frag-
ments. From a user perspective, content
owners can manage content from one
place, but the content itself can appear in
multiple places, on multiple sites and via
multiple channels. When users make a
change to the content, the change appears
on every page and in every website where
that piece of content appears helping to
enforce consistent branding.
How it works
With IBM Web Content Manager software,
the entry process for content creators is
standardized based on type of content
using authoring templates. The template
determines the design of a content form,
defines what fields and elements appear on
the form, and specifies default values. The
templates use drop-down selection boxes, radio buttons and check boxes to make it easy
for authors to create custom content. And you can include help text in the template so users
don’t need extensive training to choose the correct options. Prebuilt templates for many
types of content can be downloaded and used as is or modified to suit your needs.
Figure 3: IBM Content Templates Catalog.

9
Create (continued)
Design components like authoring and
presentation templates, menus, and
components can be organized in folders.
IBM Web Content Manager software
provides authors with personalized views
of information relevant to them, enabling
faster, more intuitive content creation.
Content approvers can see a list of items
waiting for their approval. Content authors
can quickly ﬁnd pending and historical
items that they’ve created. If they use the
same items regularly, such as a particular
template, they can mark that item as a
favorite and return to it quickly by accessing
a favorites list.
This focus on simplifying the user experience helps remove unnecessary and tedious steps
and page reloads. It weaves Web 2.0 techniques into authoring to accelerate content cre-
ation and management.
Figure 4: Folders help organize.

10
Design
Picture frames
Because this is a new microsite, Trina is
challenged with making the site design dis-
tinctive while also managing the additional
complication of cobranding. Depending on
where users originate from, the microsite
will also need to switch from an Acme-
branded page to a Bronson-branded
page. Within IBM Web Content Manager
software, Acme will be able to create those
standard design templates and customize
the branded sections based on the origin of
the site visitor.
If authoring templates enable users to paint
a picture, presentation templates build the
picture frame. Presentation templates con-
tain the code that determines the layout
and placement of content. The templates
determine the overall presentation of the
site—that is, fonts, color palette and text
styles as well as the layout of content on a
page. The presentation template also con-
tains all the header, footer, image and per-
sistent navigational elements—like sign-on
or help—that appear on every page.
The content author chooses which tem-
plate is appropriate for the content. When
the content is published, IBM Web Content
Manager software is designed to automati-
cally present the content with the desired
styling, with the placement of images in the
right place, and with the right spacing and
layout. It also enables new functionality like
tagging and rating tools to allow users to
provide feedback on website content.

11
Figure 5: The customizable design of the Acme site.
Design (continued)
Consistency
IBM Web Content Manager software takes
the most common types of web content
display and creates presentation templates.
The software includes prebuilt templates for
microsites, blogs and wikis as well as
industry-speciﬁc templates. It also gives
you the ability to customize templates
around themes and make wholesale
changes to the global design template
of your site.

12
Design (continued)
Dynamic navigation
When a person visits a website and clicks
on a link to a page in the browser, the page
is delivered to the user as a single web-
page. Behind the scenes, IBM Web Content
Manager has assembled the page by
selecting the appropriate content frag-
ments, applying styles to the content from
the appropriate style sheet, organizing the
content and images in the layout speciﬁed
in the associated presentation template,
and applying the site navigation speciﬁed
by the navigators.
IBM Web Content Manager uses two types
of components to build dynamic navigation
for the site when a user requests a page.
Navigator components display the structure
of the site and automatically create all the
links from the site navigation. Menu compo-
nents create lists of links that are shown on
a page and that are related to the content
displayed on a page. The links shown in
navigators and menus can change based
on the context the user is in—that is, the
content displayed on the page. The naviga-
tors and menus create the linked structure
between pages in the site, and the software
assembles all the pieces upon request by
the website visitor.

13
Design (continued)
Simpliﬁed developer tools
IBM Web Content Manager software
includes features that simplify certain tasks
for the developer. For example, tags within
the HTML in a presentation template are
identiﬁable by brackets. To insert a new tag,
link or image, developers can simply click
the appropriate button and specify the
properties for the item using the drop-down
boxes. There’s no coding required for these
common elements.
Figure 6: Presentation template coding.

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Collaborate
Working together
Acme’s new website needs input from
cross-functional stakeholders across the
internal value chain. Marketing communica-
tions, human resources, product manage-
ment, finance and legal—all need to weigh
in at various times as either content authors
or approvers. Site developers and design-
ers have independent workflows that are
interdependent with the launch process.
Effective collaboration among all of these
groups is essential to launching content
in a timely manner. Serial and parallel
workflows, audit trails, and track changes
features help boost mission-critical
collaboration during the content creation
process.
IBM Web Content Manager software uses a
security model that allows you to keep the
work of site developers separate from the
work of the site designers. The work of the
developers and designers is also separated
from that of the content authors and
approvers. The software includes separate
libraries so each department can complete
its work independently and collaborate
when necessary.
Customized views
When content authors or approvers sign on
to the system, they only see the content,
templates and components they are
allowed to see and need to do their job.
The user interface is clean and simple so
users can accomplish tasks quickly. Once
content is created, a review workflow is
triggered automatically. Reviewers, editors
or approvers in the workflow receive an
email notifying them that they need to take
action on new content. They simply click a
link in the email and sign on, and then they
are taken directly to the piece of content
they need to review.
They can review new content online, just as
it will appear on the website, and make any
changes or approve it. After all the
approvals are done, the new content
appears on the website. Or if the content is
supposed to coincide with an event, such
as a product launch, then you can schedule
the content to appear on the site at a spe-
cific date and time. And you can have the
content disappear from the site at a specific
date and time.

15
Collaborate (continued)
Competing priorities
While important to Acme, the Bronson
project is only one of the website priorities
in the pipeline. Within the company work-
flow, there are several projects in various
stages of development. IBM Web Content
Manager software enables Acme to choose
which content and design components are
launched at which time. Project drafts can
be created at any time, regardless of the
status of other items. Workflow can allow
multiple drafts or enforce exclusive drafts.
In other words, all the new images, content
and components for the Bronson project
can travel through the content life cycle
together without disrupting any other devel-
opment project.
One of the significant advantages of
IBM Web Content Manager software is the
ability to create a project. A project takes
content, code components, images, and
both authoring and presentation templates
and bundles them together into a logical
site update package. The items in the proj-
ect do not have to be in the same library
and they can span across many libraries. A
project can include changes in the organi-
zation of existing content. And even though
reorganized content may be live on the site,
you can preview all items in a project
together. Content live on one part of the site
will appear in its new location when you
preview the project contents. On the go-live
date for the new project, all items in the
project move together from one environ-
ment to another.
For instance, if code components are cre-
ated in the development environment, they
can be moved to the testing environment
without disturbing any other items that may
exist in the development environment.
Similarly, users can bundle all the content
and images created in the authoring envi-
ronment and syndicate them to production
as a single bundle.

16
Target
Personal experience
Acme wants to create a web experience
that feels personalized to each user
whether that person is a customer, partner,
supplier or employee. It needs to dynami-
cally adapt content and product offers
based upon the user’s behavior, prefer-
ences and relationships. Ultimately, Acme
wants to design and launch targeted cam-
paigns across multiple channels. Providing
users with relevant information based on
those channels will help increase revenue,
market share and brand loyalty.
To help ensure that search engines index
the new content to attract more site visitors,
IBM Web Content Manager software con-
tains several options within its authoring
templates. For example, the “Name” field in
the template is the page name for the URL,
the “Description” field is what will be dis-
played as the page description in a search
result, and the “Keyword” field populates
the keyword metatag. Content authors just
need to know the appropriate keywords to
get their content noticed.
From a web experience perspective,
Acme plans to take advantage of reusable
content to target site visitors, personalize
sites with role-based content and map
site-visitor preferences. The personalization
component of IBM Web Content Manager
software can select content for users
based on information in their profiles and
based on business rules. Using the author-
ing template, content can be categorized by
audience using metadata. Then content
owners can select their desired audience
from a drop-down list or check box.

17
Target (continued)
Creating commerce
In addition to IBM Web Content
Manager software, Acme also uses
IBM WebSphere® Commerce software to
drive its cross-channel and online com-
merce. WebSphere Commerce software
uses the concept of e-spots and content
spots to deliver static and dynamic content
throughout a site: e-spots are connected to
campaign rules and allow for dynamic tar-
geting and personalization; content spots
are used for static content targeting all
customers. Spots can contain images,
Flash ﬁles or text.
The IBM Web Content Manager software
integration with WebSphere Commerce
software focuses on associating web con-
tent with product pages in a commerce
store. For example, Acme can include links
to its product catalog in articles about its
new products.
IBM Business Partner Ascendant
Technology has created the Catalyst for
Commerce solution to enable WebSphere
Commerce to consume content feeds from
other applications. The third-party content
is stored in the WebSphere Commerce
authoring server and can be assigned to
e-spots, products and categories through
the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator,
helping to achieve real time to value for
your commerce channel. The integration
of IBM Web Content Manager software and
Catalyst for Commerce provides a very
compelling value proposition, enabling
content owners to manage and approve
content in a single tool and to deliver that
content to portals, commerce sites, mobile
sites and social networking sites.

18
Optimize
Wake-up call
Trina’s cell phone alarm rings at 4:50 a.m.
on Monday. The last of her weekend
dreams fade, and the mix of anticipation
and fear makes her adrenaline rush. She
runs to her computer, where she hits refresh
over and over, waiting to see if the site
launched on time.
The home page for the new site appears.
A smile creeps over her face. Growing
more excited, she clicks through each
screen and sees that each page and con-
tent item appears as expected. The project
with all its content, templates and compo-
nents has launched as expected. The site is
live. They’ve made their schedule.
As she starts composing a congratulatory
email to her team, she is looking forward to
the rest of this Monday. She knows her
work isn’t done. Acme still needs to be able
to measure the success of the launch and
the microsite. But she knows that websites
powered by IBM Web Content Manager
already include an easy way to incorporate
web analytics and reporting from major
web analytic solutions that were going to
help her understand what was working well
and what might need to be tweaked to
improve conversion rates. Over time, they
will ﬁne-tune the online experience by ana-
lyzing customer behavior, helping to
increase conversion rates and deepen cus-
tomer engagement. With the IBM Customer
Experience Suite, Acme can intelligently
manage sites, campaigns and offers by
tracking them via integration with supported
analytics solutions.
All in all, it is a good Monday.

19
Resources
More capabilities with the
IBM Customer Experience Suite
IBM Customer Experience Suite brings
together capabilities that enable you to
deliver highly engaging, personalized and
differentiated web experiences that meet
the evolving needs of today’s customer. Key
capabilities include business user content
management, a highly scalable and ﬂexible
web presentation framework, built-in social
and real-time communications, marketing
tools, personalization, enterprise search,
integration capabilities—including analytics
and commerce integration—plus mobile
device support. The comprehensive
IBM Customer Experience Suite solution
delivers the capabilities you need to
respond to individual expectations, reach
more customers and deliver exceptional
experiences.
● Create: Help reduce operational costs
and increase responsiveness by enabling
business owners to manage the delivery
of dynamic content and rich media
through multiple channels
● Target: Increase brand loyalty by creating
experiences that feel personalized to
each customer; and dynamically adapt
content and offers based on customer
actions, preferences and relationships
● Socialize: Improve customer loyalty and
help resolve problems by enabling cus-
tomers to share ideas and opinions; and
drive higher value customer interactions
via lower cost channels
● Optimize: Fine-tune the online experi-
ence by analyzing customer interactions,
helping to improve conversion rates and
engagement; and intelligently manage
sites, campaigns and offers by tracking
them via integration with supported ana-
lytics solutions
● Realize: Help improve proﬁts by maximiz-
ing cross-sell and up-sell opportunities;
and capture new leads by easily publish-
ing dynamic, compelling offers and
content
● Reach: Connect with existing customers
and new prospects across multiple chan-
nels: mobile, web, social sites, kiosks and
email
● Integrate: Deliver more personalized,
relevant web experiences by linking into
back-office applications, cloud-based
services and social sites; and aggregate
disparate systems into a seamless, cohe-
sive customer experience

Please Recycle
For more information
To learn more about IBM Web Content Manager software and other
IBM solutions, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner,
or visit: ibm.com/lotus/webcontentmanagement
To learn more about IBM Customer Experience Suite software, contact
your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit:
ibm.com/software/info/customerexperience
The preceding ebook was developed based on an original white paper
authored by Ascendant Technology employees Ann-Marie Sheppard,
Brian Newell, and Rik Frost. To learn more about Ascendant Technology
and its Catalyst for Commerce asset, please visit: http://www.atech.com
Additionally, financing solutions from IBM Global Financing can enable
effective cash management, protection from technology obsolescence,
improved total cost of ownership and return on investment. Also, our
Global Asset Recovery Services help address environmental concerns
with new, more energy-efficient solutions. For more information on
IBM Global Financing, visit: ibm.com/financing
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2011
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Produced in the United States of America
February 2011
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Delivering exceptional web experiences

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