Posts Tagged: ‘HCLDX’

The 3 Capabilities Your Digital Experience Needs to Offer

28. Oktober 2020 Posted by HCL Digital Experience Team

In order to compete today, enterprises have to offer staff and customers a fast, secure and flexible experience that’s up to the task of responding to a dizzying array of business needs. Trends and market needs can evolve as rapidly as a weather system, making an agile platform vital to keeping companies in tune with the business-critical demands. 

Business critical processes are core activities that are essential to meeting an organization’s mission — such as paying bills, making appointments, filling out time sheets, applying for permits, or filing a claim. Some of these processes are invisible to the customer and some can be seen.  This includes the fulfillment of company operations, protection of assets, and satisfying of regulatory requirements, and occur on all levels of an organization.   

Whether it’s centered on sales and marketing, accounting and finance, HR, or customer service, these business activities can be optimized by the platform they’re on, or not.  A dynamic publishing platform that can handle the business-critical needs of a company, regardless of industry, is a distinct advantage for enterprises in competitive markets.  With all the factors to be considered, what are 3 capabilities an elite publishing platform needs to have?  

Data Security and Privacy 

There’s a saying that a band is only as good as its drummer, and the same is true for the technology and security of digital experiences and platforms.  The greatest user interface in the world is worthless if it’s not secure from digital threats.   

Ensuring a secure platform includes protecting private data while it’s on-site and in-transit, with encryption that is flexible enough to connect users anytime anywhere while meeting all industry compliance requirements.   

If that sounds like a tough balancing act, well that’s because it is. But you don’t want a beautiful guitar solo being drowned out by a wildly inconsistent drumbeat, so it’s worth investing in the security measures needed to protect your operations.   

Powerful Content Creation If top-notch security is the essential but often overlooked drummer of a publishing platform, then the content is the virtuoso guitarist.  It’s what stands out most to users, holds them by the hand and ushers them into the experience.  

Crafting an effective brand message and communicating it efficiently relies heavily on how a company is able to facilitate content creation into its platform. A web content management platform should have fully responsive web and app capabilities that are scalable and easily organized.  It needs to gather all the relevant data into a single view that gives employees and staff a seamless and transparent experience.   

And it should provide employees with an intuitive platform that empowers them to become creators themselves, increasing delivery speed and further personalizing the company’s messaging.   HCL Digital Experience’s new, nimble content tools empower business users to create content and experiences without having to pull in developers. And insights and analytics — now included “out of the box” — helps marketers make customer journeys better, leading to dramatic increases in conversions.  

Content is more important than ever, and the ability to quickly build and launch personalized campaign journeys for customers is one of the true differentiators in modern enterprise business.   

Integration, of services and across devices 

Having a secure platform that boosts and distributes creative output must also integrate across channels and devices.  If the vital information coursing through the veins of an organization can’t be shared, viewed and accessed by the people who need it it’s a loss of valuable time.  

It starts with the ability to connect to legacy systems already in place, or any applications that the platform will have to work with.  Employees shouldn’t have to completely re-learn a set of tools to get work done, nor should they be slowed down by a convoluted learning curve that hinders work.  HCL Digital Experience (DX) makes it easy to integrate data and complex back-ends to create unified experiences for business-critical processes. 

A robust platform should feature drag-and-drop integration tools, self-service options, automated data updates and a seamless API manager that work cohesively for users who need to focus on their jobs, not asking IT for tech support.   

Along with a healthy integration of software and tools is the accessibility of devices and locations.  The modern workspace is mobile and doesn’t close its doors at 5pm. Employees need to have all the necessary data at their fingertips no matter where they are, and that data has to be transferable to team members and customers on any device.   

The best content management platforms for enterprise companies should offer trusted security and superior content-creation abilities in an integrated environment.  

Don’t get stuck with a drummer with poor timing or a guitarist who plays out of key.  Combine the best elements in one place you’ll have a successful band playing to a satisfied audience.  

 

The post The 3 Capabilities Your Digital Experience Needs to Offer appeared first on HCL SW Blogs.

4 Features of a Cloud-Native Digital Experience

27. Oktober 2020 Posted by HCL Digital Experience Team

Hosting a digital enterprise platform on a cloud-native setting sounds like a dream: more speed, agility, scalability, integration, and cost-savings. But is a cloud-native environment so different from a cloud-hosted one, and how do those differences manifest in workflow solutions for enterprise companies?  

Let’s look at what makes a cloud-native digital experience unique, and why the distinctions in capability are important.  

Cloud-native means more than just a digital platform  

Cloud-native describes not just an environment but an approach to design and deployment.  It is a more progressive use of cloud technology that goes beyond the previously accepted benefits — primarily storage and convenience — and features applications designed specifically to run on the cloud.   

By being “native” to the cloud — built for the cloud from day one — these applications have a scale and deployment velocity that can’t be easily matched by on-premise or even cloud hosted platforms.  Enterprise companies that adopt a cloud native system can tap into a digital experience built to thrive in a constantly evolving digital workspace where time matters more than ever.   

Cloud-native is not the same as cloud-hosted 

It could sound obvious, but it’s worth mentioning because understanding the differences between the two systems can help shine a light on the advantages of cloud-native infrastructure.   

Cloud-hosted applications are designed for on-premise environments but are deployed and managed from the cloud by a service provider.  This model was originally born from a desire to save money by shifting premises systems from a capital expense to an operating expense, saving enterprises the added financial burden of capital expense costs.   

A cloud-hosted system is a compromise which combines some aspects of cloud storage and management with legacy systems of security, maintenance and infrastructure.  Cloud-hosted services, however, can still be bogged down by clunky and time-consuming updating protocol and can be more difficult to scale as needed.  Whereas cloud-native services and applications are designed strictly for cloud environments and can respond accordingly.    

How containers and microservices speed up deployment and delivery 

Cloud-native applications are typically made up of microservices packaged in containers.  Sounds simple enough, but it gets a bit trickier from there.  Microservices are a form of software where applications are composed of single-functioning services, allowing for very granular and lightweight operation.  They can do their job without depending on or impacting other applications.  This allows developers to address issues to specific applications without affecting a wider range of operations.   

Containers, which are portable file systems that can hold everything to run an application, such as microservices, are similarly lightweight and isolated.  These two go well together because they are both designed with the intention to do one thing.    

This means that any problems or bugs that may arise within an app can be resolved faster and with greater specificity.  It also means updates can happen for a particular application without needing to wait on a larger system update or overhaul.  In this way cloud-native software can be constantly and specifically improving.   

The benefits of a fluid architecture  

Cloud-native applications and services are being adopted by more enterprises because of the adaptability and flexibility they provide.  The apps are developed to be agile, automated, and easily scaled up or down depending on need.   

The granular nature of microservices and the containers they are held in allows for a more constant and direct response to any issues that pop up, and a continuously updating system that’s more elastic than legacy systems.  

Cloud-native is also a less demanding system as far as infrastructure and maintenance when compared to cloud-hosted or on-premise platforms, which require a greater amount of time and money to service, troubleshoot and update.   

The end result is a digital experience that can match the speed of today’s business environment and keep pace as it inevitably moves faster. Digital experience transformation is more than just prettying up consumer-facing touchpoints. It can be a challenge to combine all the relevant content, information and experiences together in a way that is meaningful to your audiences. HCL Digital Experience is trusted for business-critical digital experiences for when organizations need a platform that is secure, always available, and can scale to meet the needs of the business. 

HCL Digital Experience now allows you to employ a hybrid, cloud-native architecture so administrators can provide new content production and headless API capabilities in existing on-prem environments. No migration required. We offer the broadest cloud-native platform support on the market with recently added support for Azure EKS, speeding up deployment by 10x.

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Why Video is More Essential Now than Ever in the Digital Workplace

8. Oktober 2020 Posted by Dan Allen

As more and more teams are working remotely in digital workplaces, making news and content immediately accessible is more important than ever to both companies and their employees. The way we consume and communicate information has changed dramatically and the value of video has become even more apparent as a vehicle for dissemination. In fact, studies show that  67% of people understand information better when it’s communicated visually, and younger workers are twice as likely to prefer visual communications than their counterparts. 

Not only do employees prefer video for content delivery, visual content can be more easily absorbed and understood. So, when you need to convey important messages and information, video is not only preferred, it is more efficient. It should be no surprise that video has completely transformed our content consumption habits both at work and at home.  

Rise of the remote worker 

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of remote workers increased 159% over the past decade, due in part to the ongoing digital workplace transition. The pandemic has accelerated this trend and poses significant communication challenges for companies. With a highly dispersed workforce on-demand video communication delivers an incredible advantage.  

Keeping employees engaged and productive with minimal face-to-face interaction has become more challenging. “ As many as a third (36%) of employees say their motivation levels have been affected by poor company-wide communications.” Long corporate emails turn off many employees and go unread. Video provides multi-sensory engagement and also more closely replicates being in the same room with your colleague. Videos can help close the communications gap for your remote workforce. 

Get and keep your employee’s attention 

Only 40% of employees report that they are well informed about their company’s goals, strategies, and tactics,” according to the Harvard Business review. How can we expect employees to be motivated and productive if they don’t know what’s going on? How much information is actually being consumed and understood? Forrester Research study indicates that employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than read text. Video is preferred because it provides a more human, personal touch. 

Building or shifting the company culture is another major challenge, especially when transitioning to a digital workplace. The employee intranet is a crucial component and when it comes to promoting your company culture, on-demand video should be an integral part of your strategy.  Whether delivering employee on-boarding and training, organizational announcements, tutorials, product announcements and recording live-streaming events, video ensures a consistent experience — both in terms of delivery and information. It also affords the opportunity to capture insights regarding your audience. Viewership and engagement metrics can also help guide the process and direct the company to the type of content and information employees pay attention to and value most.  

Aintranet experience that employees love 

Originally an intranet portal was simply an internal homepage to share news and information, principally a corporate bulletin board. Now it’s considered an essential element of a modern digital workplace to promote genuine dialog, facilitate employee self-service, deliver eLearning, and act as a gateway to business applications. Additionally, in-video quizzes and polls can help capture employees’ attention. 

If you need to learn how to do something quickly, where do you turn? YouTube of course. Because YouTube has an unbelievable library of how-to videos to easily guide you through any problem. Employee intranet portals should adopt the same approach – utilizing video-based guides to portal services and applications. This approach will shorten the learning curve for new hires and also promote a self-service culture. 

Empowering employees and saving money 

Saving time and money is also part of the equation. eLearning videos, rather than classroom training, can help reduce trainer costs, travel dollars and travel time while also providing employees scheduling flexibility.  

Employee self-service (ESS) portals can help reduce administrative overhead, while at the same time, keeping personal information more up to date. From speeding up on-boarding of new hires, requesting time off or rolling out new employee benefits, ESS can be an effective tool to increase employee empowerment and satisfaction. Incorporating on-demand videos to explain benefit packages or provide a how-to reference guide are crucial to successful self-service portals. There is also value in enabling employees to create, upload, and edit videos to enhance employee engagement and create a stronger sense of ownership. 

Meeting the digital workplace challenge 

Your digital workplace plans should align with your business goals and provide your employees with an environment and work tools focused on productivity and collaboration. Creating a high-performing workforce should be at the core of your strategy. To support a high-performing workforce you need an employee intranet portal to streamline communication, deliver business applications and drive cultural change.  

Since nothing communicates quite like video, build a video library, accessible from your intranet portal, to help support and speed up your digital transformation. Use your internal experts to share their insight or give your executive team a forum for sharing company announcements, goals and successes. Video has gone from nice-to-have to absolutely essential for supporting your digital transformation.  

Learn more about on-demand video by joining our webinar with Kaltura on October 27th titled: “On-Demand Video and How It Can Be the Key to Improving Digital Experiences” 


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What Are Kubernetes and Docker? And Why Should They Be Part of Your Digital Solution?

2. September 2020 Posted by HCL Digital Experience Team

Developers are becoming increasingly used to hearing the names Kubernetes and Docker in conjunction with one another. They’re both technologies associated with containers (packages of software that include all of the parts required to run an app, like the code and system libraries), but a common misconception is that they’re competing solutions. Developers might be familiar with “Kubernetes vs. Docker” discussions when, in fact, using Kubernetes with Docker is an excellent method of running containerized applications. But to understand what that means, we first have to look at what each platform does separately. 

What Does Docker do? 

Docker is currently the most popular container platform. In this context, containers are the solution to a classic developer dilemma: Often developers will write code that works perfectly well on their own machine, but fails when they try to implement it into the program it needs to live in. Containers are the solution to this dilemma  developers can package their code into one cohesive container image, which can then be run on any computer that also hosts a container platform.  

30% of enterprise companies use Docker, and that number is steadily rising. If a developer can benefit from containerization, chances are they’ll look to Docker for their solution. 

So, What Does Kubernetes Do, and How are They Related? 

Now that you have a grasp on what Docker does and why it’s an important tool to be aware of, the first thing that’s important to understand about the Docker/Kubernetes relationship is that the two technologies serve fundamentally different purposes. As the Container Journal nicely put it, “Kubernetes takes containerization technology  and turns it up to 11.”  

Kubernetes arrived as a solution to the next conundrum that comes with containerization: Now that the containers exist, how can they be organized? If Docker is in charge of packaging and distributing an application, Kubernetes is in charge of scaling and monitoring those apps. The tech solution combines containers that make up an application into intuitive groups for easy management and searchability. 

The Kubernetes architecture allows for development teams to remain agile and flexible in a rapidly evolving digital landscape where agility and adaptability are increasingly vital to standing out amidst your competitors.  

It is possible to use Docker without Kubernetes, although it’s not recommended for any organizations that hope to scale their apps and ensure that they’re easily available to as many interested users as possible. Conversely, is possible to use Kubernetes with another containerization solution, but as Docker has established itself as the premier app container solution, the Docker/Kubernetes combo remains the best integration on the market. 

solution that utilizes the Docker and Kubernetes pairing will save development teams hours of time, as the tech pairing allows apps to be installed in the cloud or on the premises in minutes, rather than days. 

Find out more hereJoin our webinar called “Getting Started with Containers,” or watch it on-demand.  

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IBM WebSphere Portal (or IBM Digital Experience) is now HCL Digital Experience and That’s a Good Thing. It’s time to upgrade

18. August 2020 Posted by HCL Digital Experience Team

If you’re looking for the latest version of IBM Websphere Portal you’ve come to the right place. IBM Websphere Portal (IBM Digital Experience) became HCL Digital Experience back in 2019 and since then has released two major updates making HCL Digital Experience the most flexible and compatible digital experience platform on the market today. 

As HCL Digital ExperienceIBM Websphere Portal, has undergone a major transformationHCL Digital Experience built upon the legendary reliability and security of IBM Websphere Portal by adding future ready features and intuitive UI redesigns to boost productivity by up to 60% and increase your ROI by up to 661%. 

The New Features in HCL Digital Experience 

With these new revolutionary updates, HCL Digital Experience (DX) currently ranks highest worldwide amongst providers of web experience management solutions. When organizations partner with HCL DX, they can expect: 

  •  The Ability to Integrate all the Things! 

HCL DX delivers customer-centric and personalized experiences by integrating your organization’s data, services, and workflows to fully integrate your current technology stack into Digital Experience. The new Experience API interface makes it easy to manage all your API connections in an easy drag and drop way. 

  •  New Reliable and Scalable Technology 

HCL Digital Experience utilizes Docker and Kubernetes to provide rapid installation, near-zero downtime and auto-scale capabilities. The automated provisioning, load balancing, and self-healing that Kubernetes offers significantly reduce the total cost of site ownership as well. Read more on how the State of Ohio was able to utilize these new features to handle a 3000% increase in traffic. 

  •  RockSolid Security and SSO 

Intelligence-agency-grade encryption and cross-system authentication, even while at rest, is built into the core of HCL Digital Experience. Single Sign-On (SSO) ensures that team members can be securely authenticated and jump right into their secured, protected work. 

  •  New Practitioner-Friendly Tools 

HCL Digital Experience took the robust content authoring capabilities of IBM Websphere Portal and turned it up to an 11 with a new reimagined user interface that dramatically reduces the learning curve and enables content to be created in half the time. Quickly build new content that responds to the market and industry needs without having to rely on IT. As agility is an increasingly important team skill, tech that helps deploy content quickly and easily has become a necessity. 

  • Cloud Native Support and Flexible Deployment 

Modern digital experiences are easy to deliver, even with a complex backend. HCL Digital Experience can now be run natively in the cloud as well as on-premises, and now has the broadest cloud native support on the market helping your organization modernize without compromise. 

  • A New Digital Asset Management System 

HCL recently released exciting new capabilities to its platform, that helps empower users to create compelling experiences, improving the bottom line and customer satisfaction. There are new media managing, rendering and versioning capabilities, and most importantly, it’s free to all DX customers! Also, it comes fully integrated so it’s faster to get up and running and one less thing to do before you can get started making content and digital experiences. You can read all about hereYou can watch the new capabilities in action here.  

Great! So How Do I Upgrade? 

Learn more about how you can upgrade to take advantage of all these new features by signing up for a free workshop where we will work directly with you to provide a personalized upgrade plan and go over any questions you may have. 

Sign up for a customized workshop here.  

Contact a sales representative here.

 

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Engaging Video Content Improves Online Healthcare for All

17. August 2020 Posted by Kirsten Kelley

Being at the forefront of the battle against Covid-19, health workers worldwide are working day and night, under extreme conditions, to treat infected patients and ensure the continuity of health services for their communities. While doing so, doctors, nurses, and health professionals face two unprecedented challenges. First, they need to stay continuously informed on accumulating trial treatment research and frequently changing clinic protocols for this little-known disease. Second, they must be able to do that while social distancing from their colleagues and working in small shifts to minimize contagion risk. Additionally, health providers find themselves at the tip of the spear in promoting the public’s understanding and education that are essential to mitigating this crisis effectively. They need to be able to  reach their audiences online and through remote communication.

Getting the Message to the Masses

In times of crisis, people seek news, data, and advice and digital experiences for healthcare become more important than ever before.  Simultaneously, their attention span is limited. For this reason, emergency information must be made available and accessible yet digestible and comprehensive.

Video as part of a digital engagement strategy helps overcome language and cultural barriers and simplify even the most complex and abstract information. Therefore, it’s ideal for educating people on any topic, from how to put a mask properly to the symptoms indicative of Covid-19. It also strikes a deeper connection and elicits stronger emotional responses, making it more memorable and effective. Studies show that viewers retain 95% of a video’s message compared to only 10% of textual information. Audiences across all generations turn to video today as their preferred method for everyday learning (68%).

Providing Impactful Information at the Right Time

Frequent communication and real-time response are crucial during a crisis. News has to get out quickly and be easily updated to correspond to changing events. Content has to be agile, easy to produce, and manageable. Using external production shops with lengthy and cumbersome approval cycles just won’t cut it. An advanced video management platform enables health providers to do precisely that, leveraging smart, accessible, and streamlined video creation and distribution tools to serve a global and diverse community in need.

Putting in place a centralized and an easy-to-navigate patient portal is essential to minimize hospital and doctor visits for routine inquiries, check-ups, and postoperative follow-ups. It also offers a single source of truth, which is always available for on-demand viewing, from any device, screen, and network, wherever you are. Curating personalized playlists and using interactive tools – like hotspots, in-video questionnaires, and interactive video paths – are just some ways to provide immersive virtual care. These engage patients, creating lean-forward, accountable, and measurable informative experiences.

Empowering Healthcare Workers with Modern Training Tools

As healthcare providers face the need to regularly share knowledge within the organization, efficiently train medical personnel, and ensure compliance, videos can prove extremely advantageous. A highly searchable VOD portal can offer nurses and doctors contextual micro-learning experiences right on their mobile devices. Live executive communications or tailored video courses can help instruct medical personnel on updated protocols. Interactive learning pathways can demonstrate new cleaning practices for clinic workers exactly when they need it.

Video also enables health providers to learn about their viewers. By analyzing video consumption and engagement patterns or evaluating answers and choices (in the case of video paths, polls, and questionnaires), video is a second-to-none source of highly useful and actionable data. Which videos are medical personnel watching? Are they watching until the end or stopping midway? What parts interest them the most? Leveraging this in-depth data lets organizations improve their training procedures, and consequently, their staff’s skills and expertise. It also allows them to monitor each staff member’s progress and verify their information retention.

Providing Consistent, Reliable and Secure Information 

Health insurers and healthcare organizations have long seen the benefits of providing personalized, secure, and engaging content to their patients and members. Adding video content that is customizable and searchable will help differentiate them from the competition by offering a unique service when patients need it more than ever.

A new normal is slowly taking shape because of the pandemic. It may require health providers to introduce more patient and staff digital communication further down the line. For now, reevaluating their educational practices and accelerating video learning is an excellent start.

To learn how HCL Digital Experience is adding industry-leading video capabilities from Kaltura to its platform, register for our webinar on October 13, 2020

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5 Ways an Intranet Can Drive Employee Productivity and Engagement

6. August 2020 Posted by HCL Digital Experience Team

An intranet is a private, secure computer network that is only accessible internally (thus, the “in” in its prefix) to a company’s employees.  Intranets surfaced in tandem with the internet in the 1990s and exist as a secure alternative to the public internet network that could be used by anyone online. It can be an integral tool for enterprises looking to improve employee communication and engagement. Employment engagement is key to an organization’s success.

A recent Gallup study1 said that only a third of employees are truly engaged in their work — and that organizations with higher engagement levels are not only more productive, they achieve four times higher earnings per share growth. 

An intranet platform provides enterprises with useful collaboration tools that can open up dialogue among co-workers while streamlining certain processes within the organization as a whole. A good one also serves as a vital tool for sharing HR and other information, as well as providing operational and computer services within an organization.

Let’s look at five ways the intranet can boost productivity in the workplace

1. Improved Communication 

Not only can it act as a direct link between staff from all departments within a sprawling organizational flow chart, it can host blogs and forums that provide employees with a unique outlet to collaborate. An intranet network can allow employees to communicate in creative and empowering ways that might not otherwise occur, promoting a much-needed sense of community. Given the way the world has moved more toward remote work, this is more important than ever.  

Intranets can have communities and discussion boards, so that instead of employees having to sift through an unwieldy company directory to find another staff member, they can easily use the intranet to connect with them and quickly enhance the work they are doing.  

Additionally, an intranet network can distribute company updates, alerts and action items efficiently to everyone, saving time and streamlining internal communications. 

2. Centralized File Storage and Comprehensive Search 

The sheer number of files, documents and digital information an enterprise must grapple with can make managers and project leads — anyone, really — shudder in horror.  Being able to locate and access the data you need when you need it can be the difference between a job getting done and a project failing.   

With an intranet network you can store all your files in one centralized location, making data searches faster.  The intranet search engine can look up key terms and connect you to the discussion, blog or piece of information you need.  Communications can also be saved and stored, making posts and notes easy to look up and review.   

3. Faster Response Time  

If a problem arises, the collaborative nature of a company’s intranet software can unleash the shared knowledge and expertise of key players.  An issue can be immediately shared, whether it’s with IT or an emergency development in another department. Teams can then troubleshoot from all angles and stay informed of the solutions.   

By acting as an information conduit for an organization, the intranet can quickly assemble the collective brainpower of the organization to identify and quickly solve an issue that could otherwise can take much longer to properly assess and address.   

4. A Forum for Creativity, and an Information Hub   

By giving some ownership of the space to employees and empowering them to utilize it, an intranet can strengthen the creative bonds between people and teams and ultimately improve the collective performance of the company.  The intranet can host a range of staff-led endeavors, ranging from discussion forums on industry-specific topics to informal spaces for brainstorming the next staff retreat. It can also be a hub of information, where relevant articles, podcasts and videos can be shared and debated.   

If employees feel plugged in and connected not just to the specific work they do but to a larger web of people and information, they will be happier and more productive in their job.  There are endless ways of sparking this type of engaged community on an intranet.   

5. A Convenient Space for Company Policies and Procedures  

We’ve all gotten the massively daunting PDF of the staff handbook filled with processes that are probably outdated by years.  It sits somewhere collecting dust, a sad reminder of a tree groove that is no more.   

An intranet network can be the digital repository that weaves together the procedures and policies of a company and can be easily accessed and updated as needed.  It can also be the centralized place where employees can access the HR benefits hub, and grab the forms they need, for things such as leave, expensesor travel.   

While your company intranet might not get its moment on center stage in a roomful of mass appreciation, it is often the backbone to a functional and successful organization. If it’s set up well, and actively used, it becomes almost an invisible part of a functional workday. And if it drives the engagement and productivity your teams and employees need, it helps you reach better business outcomes faster.  

For more information on how HCL’s Digital Experience can boost staff engagement and productivity click here.   

1Gallup Study, “Employee Engagement on the Rise in the US,” August 26, 2018.  

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HOT DAM! What’s Next? A Q&A with David Strachan, Director of Engineering

4. August 2020 Posted by David Strachan

To digitize business critical experiences, you need not only flexibility, security and power, but also the ability for your business users to create engaging content. HCL recently released exciting new capabilities to its platform, that helps empower users to create compelling experiences, improving the bottom line and customer satisfaction. We interviewed the person behind the constant development, iteration, and improvements to HCL Digital Experience to get the inside scoop on the latest updates in the latest release, as well as a window into what is coming soon. In June, we released a reinvented Content Composer and a new (free) Digital Asset Management (DAM) capability. You can learn about all of that by watching this video:

 

We talked to David to find out what’s been added since.

Q: What do new rendering and versioning capabilities mean for content creators? 

A: When an image is added, the tool now auto-generates multiple renderings suitable for each of the universal screen sizes and device dimensions of desktops, tablets, and smart phones — saving time and improving accuracy. Also, the version history of each image is now preserved, letting you revert back to previous versions as needed. These capabilities were added to the DAM in our July release and there’s more to come in the August and September releases too, including the addition of versioning support in Content Composer.   

Q: How is media (images and video) now managed in the DAM?  

A: Media is stored in collections (which act as folders), and these collections can be nested. Collections have assigned role-based access and permissions so access to the media can be controlled on a collectionbycollection basis. Media is usually published via content, so the workflow is handled at the content level. DX content management leverages the renditions so your content will look great on all devices. 

Q: Is it easier to search and find assets in the DAM? Is metadata stored? 

A: Yes. You can search by title, date and metadata. Basic metadata is automatically added, but you can and should add additional, more robust and descriptive metadata to boost SEO, as well as store rights information, photographer or videographer credits, and make finding assets even easier.  

Q: How is this native DAM better than others out there?  

A: Well, for one thing — it’s free to all DX customers! Also, it comes fully integrated so it’s faster to get up and running and one less thing to do before you can get started making content and digital experiences.  

Q: What changes are coming in the next few months?  

A: We’ve got a packed agenda for the coming months, when it comes to DAM and content management features. We’re going to see more features like custom renditions, image editing features and most excitingly a partnership with a video streaming platform so you can publish streaming videos directly from the DAM. For content management, we’re going to be extending Content Composer to cover more of the core WCM capability, such as site areas, presentation templates, components, and more. 

Q: Can I test drive Digital Experience, the new DAM or upcoming features?  

A: Yes! We invite current customers and those with curiosity to join us at regular release review sessions to keep up to date with our latest features. If you’d like to give it a try for yourself, your sales rep can help organize that. Contact one here You can also register to join us at an upcoming webinarand you can also watch lots of great videos here.

When we talked to David, he emphasized that his team is constantly updating the DAM with big improvements as well as little usability fixes — and while some changes or fixes are small, many small changes add up to big advantages.

Stay tuned and make sure you are on the latest version of HCL Digital Experience.  

The post HOT DAM! What’s Next? A Q&A with David Strachan, Director of Engineering appeared first on HCL SW Blogs.

HCL Digital Experience. Now Easier. Faster. Cloud Native.

23. Juni 2020 Posted by Brian Chaput

We are thrilled to unveil our latest innovations and updates to HCL Digital Experience!  While we are constantly updating this platform through a rolling wave of iterations and releases, this latest version is a game-changer. It helps you reimagine how you create and manage content, and lets your organization deploy up to ten times faster, offering the broadest cloud-native support in market. You can deliver business-critical content, applications, and digital experiences to your audiences faster and easier than ever before. Now business critical meets cloud native.

Expanded cloud-native platform support 

We now offer the broadest cloud-computing platform support for a digital experience solution in the market. This allows you to install and update in minutes — with the security and robustness of an on-prem solution, but the flexibility, cost-effectiveness and speed of cloud. Support has been added for Microsoft Azure and Amazon EKS, adding to existing support for RedHat Open Shift. Customers now have the flexibility to deploy where, when, and how it makes sense for the business. This, combined with the existing Docker and Kubernetes support, means deployment and installation is up to 10 times faster than before.

Create content in half the time 

Being able to deliver content for digital experiences quickly to your audiences changes how you do business. Dramatically improved content-creation tools — a completely new Content Composer — means business users can now model and create new content in half the time with a modern, intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

Hot DAM! A new cloud-native Digital Asset Manager included — free 

A new cloud-native digital asset management system (DAM) lets you add and organize media quickly and seamlessly. You can now manage your content and media from creation to execution with ease. And, unlike some other digital experience platforms in the market, this DAM is included for FREE.  

We are excited to be on this journey with you. Come join us for the global unveiling and exclusive launch of Digital Experience 9.5. 

 

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Reimagine the Way You Create and Manage Content 

15. Juni 2020 Posted by Kirsten Kelley

Easily create rich content in half the time with our totally redesigned interface and new digital asset management capabilities. 

 

Look at This! A Completely Redesigned User Interface 

 

The way we consume content has changed and our content creation tools need to adapt to the fast pace and higher standards consumers expect. At HCL, we not only value your feedback, but we act on it.  We have taken thousands of hours of real customer feedback and purpose-built a new and intuitive way for our HCL Digital Experience customers to create and manage their content for their business critical digital experiences – and we just unveiled these new capabilities to market!

The totally redesigned Content Composer enables teams to create content in half the time and boosts productivity on our platform by up to 60%. We took the most commonly used elements of the content creation process and streamlined the workflow.  Now, something that took ten minutes and six clicks takes one minute and two clicks — giving you more time to focus on the business and what directly impacts your customer experiences.  

 

The redesigned Content Composer also comes with new drag-and-drop capabilities that let you quickly and intuitively build and organize content, without having to worry about breaking file paths or ruining a perfectly designed web page.  

 

HOT DAM!  New Digital Asset Management Capabilities Included — Free 

 

We’ve also added a brand-new way for you to manage your digital experience assets like images, videos, audio files and more. This new cloud-native Digital Asset Management tool will make hunting for lost or disorganized media and files a thing of the past.  You can set metadata and tags for assets, create different renditions for use in different digital properties, and organize digital assets in collections.  All of this in a centralized location to store, discover, edit and deliver rich media assets seamlessly with HCL Digital Experience.  

While there are vendors which offer DAM capabilities as a paid add-on, ours comes built right into our platform. At no additional charge. Because these new capabilities are native, there is no need for development to implement and maintain an API connection to a third-party vendor.  This further streamlines your workflow. 

 

Not only can you add and manage rich media, but you can also edit it without needing to re-upload an updated version. Crop, scale and rotate images and videos with ease. The new DAM capabilities also work with our experience API for headless usage in digital channels, so you aren’t tied down to the Digital Experience front end. 

 

More to Come 

 

With a new interface and built-in rich-media management capabilities, HCL Digital Experience has taken content creation to the next level.  To digitize your business critical experiences, you need not only flexibility, security and power, but also the ability for your business users to create engaging content.  We empower users to create the best customer experiences, improving the bottom line and customer satisfaction.  

 

Watch the live unveiling of these new exciting features. We will be showcasing the revolutionary new features the latest version of Digital Experience has to offer. 

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HCL Digital Experience: Rising Above and Exceeding Expectations

1. Mai 2020 Posted by Brian Chaput

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And we know that when you’re one of the best, competitors want to take you down. HCL Digital Experience was born from proven, trusted technology from IBM (with IBM Digital Experience, IBM WebSphere Portal, and IBM Web Content Manager), and an important question after it was acquired by HCL became: What will HCL do with it?  We are proud to say that we have made incredible strides with our product and continue to focus on helping our customers digitize their critical business processes, much to the dismay of competitors everywhere. In fact, in IDC’s recent market note, they were extremely positive on what we had accomplished in a few short months since moving to HCL, citing our “capability to innovate and modernize” this leading platform.

As there are some misconceptions being perpetuated in the market, I want to share with you some of the things we are doing to continue to rise above and exceed expectations. HCL Digital Experience proves itself through the successes of our customers, not through false claims or promises we can’t keep.

 

Modern web languages and OpenAPIs for liberated experience delivery

Developers, take notice!  You can deliver cutting-edge experiences to any and all digital touch points, leveraging the latest front-end frameworks (ie: Vue, React, Angular) and the new self-describing OpenAPI set of REST services.  This has our competitors worried as we are empowering developers to access headless services to continue to integrate to critical business processes and applications securely, using their tools and front-end frameworks of choice.

Unsurpassed standardization and flexibility

I am particularly proud of our production Docker & Kubernetes support on RedHat OpenShift, Amazon EKS, Microsoft Azure as well as others and the benefits that it provides to our customers.  This means that initial install and subsequent updates of HCL DX software take minutes, not hours or days; and provides unmatched flexibility and portability, so you can select the deployment model, on premises, private cloud or hosted on the platform of your choice.  Unlike some of the other solutions in the market, HCL DX is proven, secure, and provides rock-solid reliability — which is necessary all the time, but never more important than in these unprecedented times.

 

Re-imagined content tools to help accelerate time-to-market

Cloud-native new digital asset management capabilities, a re-imagined Practitioner Studio experience, a new persona-driven Content Composer and a beautiful set of out-of-box templates help business users create, manage and publish memorable experiences more effectively.  Plus, with integrations to other leading HCL products mentioned above, we provide a complete solution to help your team’s productivity soar and help deliver essential content to all audiences that need it.

 

Reduced TCO and Improved ROI – all in one!

With market uncertainty, having a platform that is not only performant and rock solid, but cost-effective, is key.  HCL Digital Experience’s Kubernetes orchestration for automated provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, self-healing (and more) helps dramatically reduce TCO. Plus HCL Digital Experience now integrates with other powerful HCL products — Commerce, Unica, and Connections — adding capabilities and strengths to your solutions. By leveraging a platform that helps you seamlessly blend your content, data, applications, and core processes into a meaningful unified experience personalized by role and identity helps drive significant returns on your investment.  In a recent IDC study, they found that HCL Digital Experience customers saw an average 661% ROI!

 

And we are JUST getting started!

And for those companies that may wonder if we are continuing to invest in this space, I can enthusiastically say, YES!  We continue to grow our worldwide team of developers (which has almost doubled in 9 months) and invest significantly in releasing new capabilities to the market every few weeks.  Check out the latest blogs for our March and April updates to learn more.  We also work closely with our customers and partners to include their feedback and suggestions to directly affect the prioritization of new capabilities that will be added — going as far as to invite them to our monthly sprint calls with the development team.  We are invested in our customer success — and proving it.

 

For more information, visit our website, and checkout a short webinar about the mission-critical solution HCL Digital Experience helped deliver at the State of Ohio.

To stay up-to-date on the latest news, subscribe to our newsletter.

 

 

Trusted for Business Critical Digital Experiences

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April Update: What’s New in HCL Digital Experience

13. April 2020 Posted by David Strachan

April is upon us and with that another round of feature releases for HCL Digital Experience. We are now releasing new and exciting features every month, so keep an eye out for more announcements like these. This release is packed with updates to improve development flexibility, content creation, and integrations. Check out the five new features and enhancements below, and be sure to let us know what you think. 

1. We have expanded the WCM APIs available to cover additional scenarios that our customers will find valuable. The additional APIs enable developers to restore content versions, apply content templates, modify content template settings, and to export and modify links to Digital Asset Management (DAM) resources.

2. We are excited to launch the first preview of our brand-new DAM. This is a major new feature for managing web-ready images, videos, and documents — from within HCL DX. In this preview release you can upload and organize assets and use them in content items. All of the capabilities in the DAM are also available in our Experience API. Every month, we’ll be building on this with new features.

3. We are just as excited to launch the first preview of our new Content Composer. This is a completely reimagined user interface for our web content-management capability, designed to make using DX much easier. In this initial preview, we are focused on enhancing management operations for content and templates, covering the most commonly used element types. As with the DAM, we will also be building on this with new features every month.

4. Both DAM and Content Composer are built on our new API layer, Experience API. All of the features in their user interfaces are available in Experience API, as are the WCM APIs we added in this release. We are moving to an API-first approach, meaning that the product’s capabilities are defined by the API. This makes it much easier for customers to programmatically access HCL DX capabilities. Transparent programmatic access means no more internal APIs or hidden extension points.

5. We have also made a number of updates to our Kubernetes Operator, both to fix issues identified in previous releases, but also to add automation to deploy DAM, Content Composer and Experience API. As the product evolves towards a more cloudnative future, a fully featured operator ensures ease of management for our customers.  

We are fully committed to the future development of HCL Digital Experience and we hope these monthly updates speak to that. We will continue to build on them in monthly releases going forwards. Check out the new step-by-stop guide to downloading DX products. 
https://support.hcltechsw.com/csm?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0077878 

Be sure to send me your feedback to me at davidst@hcl.com. We want to ensure your ideas, comments, and frustrations are fully heard, so we can continue to add the most relevant features and capabilities that matter most to you, our customers. 

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HCL Digital Experience and the future of WebSphere Application Server

8. April 2020 Posted by David Strachan

What we are doing with WAS?

HCL is bringing renewed energy to Digital Experience, as we add new capabilities and move to a much more aggressive release schedule. Customers often ask what we are going to do with IBM® WebSphere® Application Server (WAS) and the purpose of this post is to explain what we intend to do.

Customers around the world have entrusted HCL Digital Experience with their business critical workloads for 20 years. WAS clustering provides a rock-solid foundation for that, and as a result unplanned outages are very rare and performance is consistently excellent. We are not going to treat that lightly or recklessly.

What is rock solid, but flexible?

That said, our customers are also asking us for a less monolithic approach to HCL Digital Experience (DX). Many of them are investing in Kubernetes as the runtime environment of the next decade. We are responding to that demand with the support for Kubernetes that we released in HCL DX v9.5 and enhanced subsequently.  HCL’s strategy is to provide a gradual approach, in order to minimize disruption for our customers, while enabling new runtime architectures as quickly as possible.

When we released HCL Digital Experience 9.5 in September 2019, we announced that it would be supported for at least another five years. This means customers can continue to run their WAS clustered environments during this time, and we will continue to enhance it.  In this release, we added a supported option to run the product in a Kubernetes environment, such as Red Hat’s OpenShift or Amazon EKS. More Kubernetes platforms will follow, driven by customer demand. Existing applications will run on this platform, and most customers should be able simply to redeploy their applications using the staging-to-production workflow.  Existing portlets and themes will also still run in Kubernetes deployments of HCL DX 9.5.

In parallel, our future direction is clearly towards the Kubernetes architecture. We are creating new services, such as our Digital Asset Manager, Content Composer or Experience API, all of which are based on technologies other than WAS. These new services provide exciting new capabilities for our customers, which we hope will make it easier for our customers to justify moving to our Kubernetes architecture.

For clarity, we will not have a singular migration event in which we re-platform HCL Digital Experience to another application server, because that would introduce risk and uncertainty to our customers. We are focusing on adding new features that add value to our customers, and ensuring that existing customers can adopt those.

We hope this statement of direction is clear and helpful. We would love to hear from you if you have comments or questions about this. We would also love to discuss how you can get the most out of your HCL Digital Experience  deployment and help ensure your are on an up to date version. Please get in touch with your HCL representative to discuss this further, or you can reach out to Kirsten.Kelley@hcl.com if you need additional information.

 

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Digital Experiences Matter. Especially in Times of Crisis

6. April 2020 Posted by Brian Chaput

“Business-critical” has never mattered more than right now.

All digital experiences matter, but some matter more than others.  The COVID-19 crisis response is forcing governments to define what is “essential” for populations operating under stay-at-home directives. What is, in fact, essential are those digital experience touchpoints we all need to rely on to stay informed, to stay vigilant, and perhaps most importantly, to stay connected and productive.

This is when rock-solid and reliable digital experiences truly matter most. This is when business-critical applications and core systems not only have to work — they have to continue to run operations from wherever we are to ensure our customers, partners, or employees have the information they need to be safe, productive, and up to date. Because HCL Digital Experience is the kind of platform that has the power, reliability, and security necessary to keep complex and business-critical processes running we know what’s required to deliver this level of service to digital audiences. We have broken down the essential qualities necessary for this success here into six main categories. Your business-critical digital experience platform must be:

  • Performant: In these challenging times you need to ensure that your audiences are able to get the information they need, when they need it. Downtime is not an option. Business-critical means that your system is rock-solid, reliable, scalable, and can support fluctuating demand with ease.
  • Secure: Your businesses’ data needs to be protected. As we move to communicate even more fluidly online, you need to be confident that you can offer secure experiences with data encryption and cross-system authentication. Business-critical means your data cannot be compromised.
  • Personalized: Provide the right information to the right people at the right time. You need to enable your customers, employees, and partners with the right level of access to your system to access and provide necessary data. Business-critical means that the information presented is relevant and contextual, based on your relationship with them, and what they are doing on your site.
  • Integrated: Provide the whole story. Your enterprise has a wealth of information that resides in a variety of systems. Business-critical means that you can seamlessly blend your content, data, applications, and core processes into a meaningful unified experience personalized by role and identity.
  • Flexible: Develop smarter, update faster. You can select the deployment model (on-prem, any cloud, or hybrid) and platform of your choice, and be up in running in minutes. Business-critical means that with traditional OnPrem or optional Docker/Kubernetes support you can choose what deployment approach fits your operation best today, with the flexibility and portability to change on your timeline.
  • User-Friendly: Empower business users to create. Put your subject-matter experts in control with easy-to-use tools that help them quickly create targeted, engaging content for all audiences, and let your developers focus on developing new technology. Business-critical means that essential content gets to the audiences that need it, and your team’s productivity can soar.

When you need to digitize your business processes and take your business-critical applications online, you need HCL Digital Experience. We are here to help.

Learn how our partners are empowering organizations to meet the challenges of Covid-19.  Join these short webinars to learn more:
  • Digital Experiences Matter in Times of Crisis.  Chatbots can help.  Watch the webinar
  • Digital Experiences Matter in Times of Crisis.  Lessons learned from the State of Ohio.  Watch the webinar
  • Digital Experiences Matter in Times of Crisis.  Alerting can be key. Watch the webinar

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Staying Connected is More important than Ever

26. März 2020 Posted by Brian Chaput

We are all in this together. This is something that we are hearing a lot lately, even though many of us are isolated (physically and socially distanced) from our families, friends, and co-workers. In times like this, technology can allow us to stay in touch, connected, and informed — and this is more important than ever.

At HCL, we are proud to see the strides our teams, customers, and partners are making to continuously communicate and inform their audiences of the latest developments of COVID-19, and how they can be better prepared.

As the spread continues, state and local governments around the world have seen an increase in demand for information about how the virus is affecting their local communities, and where citizens can go for help.  Employees need powerful communication and communication platforms to make sure they have critical information — especially in industries like healthcare, travel, and transportation — and can stay abreast of the latest processes and procedures to keep themselves (and their customers) safe. Health insurance providers are working to ensure that they can support their employees that are now largely working from home and need secure access to critical business applications, and their members about the latest resources available to them.

All technology and digital experiences matter, especially in this unprecedented time of home confinement and instability. All of us need accurate and up-to-date information and guidance that we can trust — and the platform that delivers it must perform and scale in times of surging requests. We want you to know that HCL is here to help in any way we can. We are committed to being flexible, responsive, and available. And those of us on the Digital Experience team are here, specifically, to help with making sure you have the best when it comes to secure, scalable systems to digitize your business processes for your employees, partners and customers, and to always keep the lines of communications open. If you are a current customer and need help, please let us know.  If you are challenged with being able to deliver critical applications to your employees to keep them safe, and to stay productive, we are here to help.

Please reach out to your HCL representative to see how we can help. #WeAreAllinThisTogether

 

 

 

 

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