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HTML 5: The ultimate in video portability
There’s a lot of buzz on the Internet these days about HTML 5 video. What exactly is it? Is it code? Does it rely on a specific codec? What about Flash? Is it dead?
At the end of the day, HTML 5 video is all about making sure that visitors to your site can actually watch the content you have so painstakingly prepared for them. Let’s face it, hiring producers that understand all of the ways which top quality video can affect your customers is costly and time consuming, therefore, it’s a simple matter of ensuring that your content gets eyeballs from every device out there: smartphones, tablets, and, of course, PCs.
We know the goal is simple, so how complex is the task? For the most part, it’s extremely simple because of the advanced capabilities of YouTube. Upload your video to YouTube, embed it in your site, and it’s ready to go on every device imaginable. The trouble arises when you don’t want your videos on YouTube, or, you have an existing catalogue of video content encoded into FLV (Flash).
Sometimes, you don’t want your video to be hosted on YouTube, for whatever reason. In this case, you’ll have to embed the video in your site and host the video on your web server. This means you’ll have to have a full understanding of how HTML 5 video works. Assuming your video is in an uncompressed format, you’ll have to encode it to 4 or 5 different formats and set up an embed tag on your web page that allows the web browser, be it Firefox, Mobile Safari, or Internet Explorer, to determine which file to load. Once determined, the browser loads the video natively without any plugin. Goodbye Flash and Silverlight. This method works in all HTML 5 compliant browsers and has a fall back to Flash for browsers that require a plugin (Internet Explorer 6). You’ll also need a JavaScript snippet for Android.
The landscape of video codecs is another thing to be aware of here. Google has recently tossed aside support for H.264 for an open licence Web M codec, though H.264 will be licence free in 2013. Mozilla doesn’t support H.264, so you must use OGG Theora to reach the millions of Firefox users out there. Apple and RIM will play back H.264, but require 2 different extensions: .m4v and .mp4 respectively. And, the iPhone requires an iTunes optimized file format to play natively. Luckily, HTML 5 video can be extended to live-to-web video streaming, as well.
If you have a library of existing video content, it is most likely encoded in .flv format. If this is the case, you should strongly consider finding the source material and re-encoding it. It definitely appears that running video natively within browsers, and without a plugin, is the way of the future, so even though modern Flash codecs may be nearly as good as H.264, there really is no need for FLV files. Also, an .m4v file plays just fine a Flash player (.swf). Once you’ve obtained your uncompressed material, go ahead with the steps above. If you can’t access it, your only choice may be to re-encode your FLV content to H.264, which may appear lossy.
Your web master could easily build an HTML 5 video embed tag for your site, so the only issue left is to convert your raw video into HTML 5 supported codecs, starting with H.264. Decent video producers these days should have excellent knowledge in high quality video encoding for the web.
About the Author:
Adam Blainey is the President of Rock Bay Media, located in Victoria, British Columbia. Rock Bay Media specializes in online video and mobile applications.
Web CMS Vendors Battle for Control of the SMB Market
Web content management software is a bloated market space, and with sales growth in the billions you will literally find hundreds of vendors all fighting for top position. Visiting the vendor websites to gain a perspective on what differentiates one WCM vendor from another is far more difficult than one would imagine and more times than not, a fruitless exercise.
So if your looking to purchase a WCM solution for the first time or upgrading an existing system; the vendor selection process can be foggy at best. So, how does one start in narrowing down the options and ultimately selecting the best solution for your current requirements, budget and long-term needs?
CMS Connected (www.cms-connected.com) showcases top CMS vendors in an interactive 60-minute debate style webinar, helping you get beyond the glossy brochures and marketing hype by asking the real tough questions you want to know. In addition, the attending webinar audience also has the opportunity to ask the vendor guests a few ‘no holds barred’ questions as well.
On April 7th, 2011, two of the most affordable and feature rich mid-level .NET CMS products on the market today, Kentico and Telerik’s Sitefinity will go head-to-head on CMS-Connected. Sign up now for this free webinar event and find out who reigns supreme!
Your Website Needs a Social Life
You’re proud of your website and you should be: it’s easy to use, looks great and is packed with fresh content. But while you’ve been working hard to keep your website current and compelling, the wider web has been changing around you. And the way people approach websites like yours is changing too.
- A website used to be a place to read things… Now it’s a place to do things.
- A website used to be only about creating great content… Now it’s also about creating great web experiences.
- A website used to be a one-way medium… Now it’s a many-to-many conversation.
This ‘Social Web’ transformation, driven by the wildly popular social media experiences like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter is changing the way the web works and the way your visitors think. The social web is about fully engaging users and treating them as more than just consumers of content or adherents to your agenda. In the social web, visitors are full participants, sharing their views, their content and their contacts. The result is an exponential increase in user involvement that is changing the fundamental principles and dynamics of marketing. Brands that succeed in tapping into this enormous power will reap the rewards in traffic, loyalty, revenues and market share. Brands that fail to learn the new rules of the social web will be left with the scraps.
What Is a Social Website?
A social website is any site that invites people to participate by publicly sharing their thoughts, feedback, opinions, links and any content they’ve created as well as images and videos. It also encourages them to share their experiences with friends or colleagues, whether on the site or beyond and makes it easy to do so.
Why You Need to Be More Sociable
There are plenty of reasons to make your website more social than it is today. Here are some of the most important ones:
Engage people more fully - Your customers, prospects and target audiences are human beings first. And human beings appreciate being asked what they think about things. Nobody likes to be talked at. It’s not polite.
Boost credibility - People are more likely to trust another user than they are to trust you. Harness that force to your advantage by giving a forum to your brand advocates – yes you give airtime to detractors too, but this in itself shows confidence and boosts credibility.
Increase stickiness - ‘Unique visitors’ is no longer the killer metric of the web. Engagement metrics like time on site, page views and repeat visits are. Anyone with a budget can generate raw traffic. It takes sociability to turn that traffic into something more valuable.
Listen to your users - Instant feedback from your customers and site visitors is an incredibly valuable – but under-exploited – asset. A social website gives your brand ears.
Influence your market - You can’t join the conversation until there’s a conversation to join. Once you’ve started one, it’s a great opportunity to get involved, address negative comments, de-fuse time-bombs, acknowledge positive input, reward your brand advocates and generally get your views across.
Better target your messages - The more you know about someone, the better you can tailor your messages to them. Active involvement in your community gives you priceless insight into attitudes, behaviors and propensity to buy. It also sharpens your segmentation and feeds your personalization efforts.
Harvest great content - User-generated content – from blog comments to photos and video – enriches your site and makes it more interesting, entertaining and valuable to other users. And it’s free if you ask nicely.
Boost your search engine results - Google spiders love lots of new, relevant content. The more you can attract, the better you’ll do on search results pages and the more traffic you’ll generate.
Generate buzz - Static websites that don’t engage visitors look and feel like ghost towns. Websites that are bubbling with activity, community and participation show that your brand is young, vital, successful and popular.
Top 10 Tips on How to Go Social
Adding social features to your website isn’t difficult but if you get it wrong, your failure will be rather… public. So here are a few tips:
- Moderate gently - Fairness is a core principle of the social web. If you kill every negative comment, you lose respect as a moderator and alienate your community. Much better to respond constructively to negative feedback in the same forum it was given. Only resort to censoring or banning in extreme cases.
- Open your kimono - There’s no point going social if you’re going to be overly defensive or ‘corporate’. The social web is a great opportunity to lower your guard, give the spin doctors a Valium and just respond to people openly and honestly – you’d be amazed how much they’re willing to forgive if you just say sorry.
- Look after your super-users - Every community has champions – the people who really identify with your brand (or the activity you’re involved with) and get stuck right in. Identify these super-users and make sure they feel welcome and valued. Give them special privileges. Reward their loyalty. They’ll return the favor.
- Walk before you run - Don’t launch an über-community if you don’t have any traffic, a blog or simpler forums. Build your community from the ground up, listening to your users as you grow.
- Don’t forget great content - Social media never lives in a vacuum. You still need to populate your community areas with great content from your CMS to keep people interested, involved and coming back for more. You can’t expect users to do all the heavy lifting. Just make sure your CMS can easily connect.
- Respect privacy - This is absolutely essential. The kind of people who participate in web communities are the kind to get really rabid when their trust is abused. Only use data in exactly the way you say you will. No exceptions.
- Go beyond your site - A social relationship with your community doesn’t stop at the borders of your own site. Go out and meet people where they congregate. Join Facebook groups, comment on blogs, set up a YouTube channel and a Twitter account. All are great forums for listening – and for recruiting people to your social website.
- Get the back end right - Some social features (like social bookmarking) are fairly lowtouch. Others require a significant amount of back-end programming and integration. Make sure your developers know what they’re doing – and start with a Content Management System that you know can handle the job (if the social functionality is already pre-coded and templated, so much the better).
- Performance matters - Social sites make much greater demands on your servers than simple content sites – especially if user-generated photos and videos are involved. You may need a platform that can handle millions of users and billions of page views per month. If your CMS can’t scale to the demands of the social web, you risk frustrating (or losing) your users.
- Analytics are critical - You need to actively monitor and measure all activities on your social pages just as you would on the rest of your site. Make sure your social features include rich reporting and analysis. User stats drive insight.
The Role of Your CMS
The Content Management System you choose will make a big difference in the success of your social web initiatives. The right CMS will not only make it much easier to introduce social features, it will also make for richer, simpler, easier-to-use social web experiences.
Ideally, you need a CMS that is:
Social-centric – Not every CMS is built to handle the more challenging social features discussed here. If social media is not in the DNA of your CMS, shop around. Ask to see the community templates.
Editor-friendly – You need a CMS that makes it easy for non-technical editors to add content, create pages and moderate comments.
Developer-friendly – Developers shouldn’t have to learn a whole new language just to create social features for your site.
Modular – Your CMS should always be growing by letting you snap on new modules as they’re developed.
Widely used – A popular CMS has an active developer community to contribute modules, ideas, advice and experience.
Actively supported – You’ll want a CMS that has someone standing behind it – for support, development, training and advice.
Go forth and socialize!
Note: A special thanks to Alex Martel, Channel Sales Manager at EPiServer North America for supplying some great material from their eBook.
The Politics of Selecting a Web Content Management System
Falcon-Software first became involved with web content management (WCM) back in 1995. Our IT manager at the time suggested that we build our own custom WCM solution as a value added for our growing list of clientele. Knowing that the writing was on the wall and the days of deploying static websites were numbered, we decided to move forward with our first generation proprietary ASP CMS solution.
We closely monitored the impact it had on our business and found that it opened up a whole new revenue stream for Falcon-Software. Fifteen years later, it has become the core of our services – developing and deploying .NET WCM solutions, while assembling one of the most complete and comprehensive list of vendors in the industry. This strategy allows us the ability to provide the ideal technology solution for our clientele’s unique technical requirements and business needs.
We are often asked — How can Falcon-Software be highly proficient in understanding and implementing so many different .NET WCM solutions?
First and foremost, we have a solid foundation in .NET technology and almost two decades of experience deploying WCM solutions in a wide variety of different sectors. Having a strong .NET knowledge-base to pull from allows us to exceed client expectations no matter what WCM platform we use. In my opinion, when you are limited to only one or two WCM vendor solutions, objectivity becomes seriously compromised.
Secondly, we understand the differences between the top .NET CMS solutions. They all promote user-friendly interfaces, customizable workflows, online forms, reporting analytics, e-commerce and social media modules – the similarities go on and on. The real trick in recommending one WCM product over another is understanding their differences. Some vendors have a robust Intranet modules as their differentiator, others may have a more mature social media package that allows you to deploy fully featured web portal communities rather than just a simple blog. So it all comes down to understanding the client’s needs and technical challenges and matching them to a WCM system that best fits their budget.
Integrators that offer only one particular WCM system will undoubtedly make them an authority on the product over time. But, is that in the client’s best interest? Certainly not. Launching a WCM system that works flawlessly from an integrators point-of-view does not always translate to being a successful project. One of the main reasons so many WCM implementations fail is poor adoption by the system administrators and site contributors that work with the product day in and day out. This could be due to several reasons - it could be too complicated for the user or it may not provide the ideal solution they were expecting the product to solve or users aren’t provided proper training. Regardless, there is no one size fits all WCM product on the market today that can provide the best solution for everyone’s requirements or budget.
We are also frequently asked — Since we have experience deploying so many different WCM systems – Which is the better product – for example Ektron or Sitecore? If you’ve spent any length of time in the WCM industry, you have almost certainly noticed the fierce rivalry between competing vendors. At times it can get pretty nasty and lines are constantly being crossed making the politics of the business just as immature and counterproductive as government politics. So, how does an integrator that supports several different products separate itself from the mud-slinging and smear tactics so heavily deployed amongst the WCM brotherhood? Our answer is simple and factual. Both Ektron and Sitecore are very good .NET WCM platforms and are well represented with thousands of customers across the globe and both have very mature development communities.
The problem is the question. The proper question should be – which WCM platform is the right one for my organization? Unfortunately, the answer is far more complicated and you should make sure you understand your own politics, technical challenges and organizational needs as a starting point. Then explore the WCM vendors that best match your criteria. Make sure you have a demo of the short-listed vendors and include all the key stakeholders and site administrators. Then setup a ‘sandbox’ trial version and start playing with the products in real-case scenarios. What you’ll find is the ability to answer your own question – Which is the best WCM product for me?
List of Web CMS Vendors
The list of vendors below is by no means complete, but certainly in our opinion stable solutions. We also linked the systems Falcon-Software supports.
- Alfresco
- Alterian
- Autonomy WCM (was Interwoven)
- CoreMedia CMS
- Day Software
- Ektron
- Elcom CommunityManager.NET
- EPiServer
- Fatwire Content Server
- GOSS iCM
- Ingeniux CMS
- Microsoft SharePoint WCM
- Open Text WEM (was Vignette & Nstein)
- Open Text WCM (was RedDot)
- Percussion CM System
- SDL Web Solutions
- Sitecore
Small to Mid-Level WCM Systems:
- Bridgeline iApps
- Clickability
- CrownPeak
- DotNetNuke
- Drupal
- eZ Publish
- Hippo
- Hot Banana
- Joomla!
- Kentico
- Plone
- Telerik Sitefinity
- TYPO3
- Umbraco
About Us
Falcon-Software offers website planning, creative design, development, Ektron, Elcom, EPiServer, Kentico, SharePoint, Sitecore, and Sitefinity WCM implimentations, WCM training and server hosting services.
We invite you to get started today. Call us for a free consultation at 800-957-1126.
CMS Fight Club Goes Live & Interactive!
The blog series CMS Fight Club was a huge success, gaining a fan-base across North America. Due to the series unexpected popularity, we have decided to change it from a blog format to an interactive Webinar format. This will allow the attendees the opportunity to participate live with the Guests and Host.
We have also named the Webinar Series CMS Connected. To find out more or to sign up for the next Webinar event go to:
WCM Vendors Head to the Cloud
To keep in-step with the ever-increasing number of organizations looking to leverage cloud platforms, vendors such as Alterian, Clickability, CrownPeak, EPiServer, Kentico, Open Text, Sitecore, Sitefinity and SpringCM have all launched cloud compatibile versions of their WCM software.
So, why is everyone’s head is in the clouds?
The workplace has exploded beyond the traditional boundaries of the office walls. Today’s workforce is more mobile than ever before, and companies are reevaluating the office cubicle and 9-to-5 workday model in favor of a more cost effective virtual workforce. Consequently, workers need to be able to access and engage with their crucial business content across devices and applications. With web-based content management, files are accessible on multiple devices, and open APIs make it easy to integrate cloud content management solutions with other web-based business applications – such as salesforce.com or Google Apps.
Cloud solutions are more cost effective on a per-user basis, go live faster, update seamlessly and frequently, and carry far less risk with implementation and execution. We’ve all heard stories about six-or-seven-figure technology purchases that never got off the ground or were only implemented narrowly. The on-demand nature of cloud and SaaS systems make such events nearly risk-free in terms of time and money. And cloud platforms will only get more affordable as vendors benefit from immense economies of scale as their business grows, and pass along these cost savings to the customer.
Across all generations, today’s knowledge workers are significantly more web savvy than ever before, but this evolution has largely been driven by consumer technologies. Consumer applications like YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook are fast, intuitive, and don’t require anything extra to get started. Today’s workers, especially those who grew up using these consumer tools, require software that helps them get their job done with the simplicity and usability of the internet. There’s a fundamental difference between giving your employees software that they want to use rather than software that they have to use.
The notion of moving any large data repository to a cloud computing infrastructure still makes many CIOs and IT managers nervous, but it’s already proving to be the wave of the future for WCM systems. Forrester Research recently released its report, which projects the size of the world market for cloud service will expand from $40.7 billion in 2011 to greater than $241 billion in 2020. As different cloud service providers emerge, if they emerge, users will have a variety of service options and solution configurations, along with varying fees for service as the providers compete for efficiency.
So, does the hype live up to expectations? The cloud certainly offers clear advantages, but there are trade-offs and you need to understand them before you make any infrastructure decisions.