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 collection-by-collection 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...

We are fully committed to the future development of HCL Digital Experience and we hope these monthly updates speak to that.

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...

To that end, we are going to switch up the pace for the HCL Digital Experience Docker images that we ship. Our new cadence will be to ship an update every two sprints — that's approximately every four weeks.  We are modernizing our development methods to keep on track with market demands and help our customers deliver more capabilities to their audiences faster.

Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to create an attractive marketing page, or a powerful web experience, and the tools just seem to get in your way?  Do you need to create an attractive marketing page, but the backend tools are lacking? Are you frustrated looking for skilled resources to manage and create the experiences? We can help.