The integration between WCM and portals has been a source of frustration for many customers. Vendors have not been good at telling customers where the integration did have some shortcomings. This has been costly for some organizations as they have been forced to reconsider basic features such as preview and navigation which have a tendency to fall in the gap somewhere between the two systems

CMS Wire recently ran a popular article on 5 Things to Consider when Integrating your Content Management System and Portal, which covered different technology options for integration. The article caused Hippo Chief Technology Officer Arje Cahn to comment that “integrating Portal and CMS is more than just adding a ‘content portlet’.”

In his view content is not simply another application running inside a portlet. as content behaves very differently from legacy applications. To give an example: users expect content to be reused across different sections in a portal, wherever that makes sense.

Hippo is originally from the Netherlands, but also has a strong US-base, which includes David Sean Taylor who has been very active with portal projects at the Apache Software Foundation.

You can meet Arje Cahn with a fellow Hippo colleague at our conference in Philadelphia and discus their take on portals and how to make projects happen. Hippo will also be a part of our Web Idol competition, where you will have the opportunity of experiencing a demo of the product side-by-side with other vendors.

Organizations need richer, more intuitive and engaging user experiences.

This is the key theme of the opening keynote by Gartner analyst Jim Murphy on the user experience track.

Today companies want web applications and services to be available to users in any situation and on any device. User interaction, rich media, and social concepts are no longer options, and mobility is no longer an afterthought.

These trends are driving the next iteration of user interfaces which Gartner calls user experience platforms (UXP). UXP derive from portal frameworks and among the critical factors are context aware computing, rich internet applications, and enterprise mashups. UXP could provide the bridge that finally aligns the efforts and interests of IT, the business and the end user.

Jim has been following the industry for more than a decade and has published several research papers on user interaction and user interfaces. Past J. Boye Conference delegates can download his slides on The Next-Next-Generation Web and the Future of the Portal from our 2008 European conference.

In his talk Jim will also highlight innovative User Experience approaches by leading practitioners.

Following Jim on the user experience track is brief case studies from Sears and Wienerberger who will share their experiences. If you are interested in portals, there’s also our portal roundtable where you can discuss whether your project needs a portal.

What are the user experience trends for 2010 in your view?

John Petersen of Sutro Software has focused on portals for most of his working life. He has agreed to host a roundtable which will address the intersection between web content management and portals. John has a background with portal pioneers Epicentric, which were later acquired by Vignette.

Our roundtables is a special type of conference session without prepared slides. Join the discussion at the portal table in Philadelphia, where you can work with peers to identify some of the emerging best practices about when or if your web content projects can benefit from portal technology – or add your thoughts below.