Day Software's CQ 5.2: Weaving in DAM and Social Collaboration

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Mar 31, 2009

Riding the CQ 5 and CRX momentum waves, Day Software (site, news) just released CQ 5.2 featuring new Social Collaboration (SoCo) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) applications.

While marrying web content management with social media, web 2.0 and DAM is hardly revolutionary — nowadays, it’s more about execution than the idea itself.

Social Collaboration Blooming in CQ 5.2

Today’s enterprise customers may want Social Collab, but don’t necessarily know how to do it and how to manage a myriad of home-grown and third-party web 2.0 apps from all over the place. What Day did is interweaved Social Collaboration into their CQ5 WCM for easier management of all the fun activities like social profiling, blogs, wikis, calendaring, comments and rating, feeds, etc.

The integration comes with workflow integration that allows for moderation and permissions settings — something many organizations may find very appealing.

Blogging and Wikis

While we do not agree with Day’s statement that “personal blogging is dead,” corporate blogging does hold some value. By wanting to address all the needs of enterprise bloggers, Day proposes WCM integration with workflow, SPAM and XSS protection capabilities. However, a blogger doesn’t actually need to interface with CQ5 WCM.

Enterprise wiki is where things are starting to get interesting. Day claims this is the first 100% JCR-based enterprise wiki. It runs on same platform as CQ5 WCM and can be integrated with your LDAP, while providing support WYSIWYG editing and wiki syntax. Using OSGi modules, you can extend the wiki to your heart’s content.

Calendaring, Feeds and Social Profiles

The new social calendaring tool is pretty standard by today’s standards. Personal, group and website calendars can be shared and integrated
through iCal (subscribe) and export (ICS and RSS feeds).

CQ5.2 also offers iGoogle integration with OpenSocial Container that can host your most beloved Google gadgets. Creation of additional OpenSocial gadgets is supported through CQ5’s RESTful API.

Social profiles are implemented with complete profile life cycle management in mind, allowing users to manage registration, moderation, permissions, etc. from the WCM system, as profile pages are actual CQ5 WCM pages and can be customized as any other content page.

Stencil API allows for bulk user profile management acting as a structure placeholder for all profile pages that can be filled with user-specific, actual data.

RSS & Atom feeds are handled with Feed API. Using the two default servlets — *.entry.xml and *.feed.xml — CQ 5.2 users can generate RSS entries and feeds. Podcasts’ generation can be accomplished automatically for nt:files.

The SoCo offering is topped with a built-in XSS Protection Library for all your Social Collab components and JSPs.

Reverse Replication Architecture

In what Day calls Reverse Replication architecture, content can be created in the author node, published and then accepted from Publisher for reviews. Alternatively, content can be created at Publisher as well, allowing to catch user-generated content and apply workflow and moderation to it.

day cq 5.2 reverse replication.jpg

CQ 5.2 Reverse Replication Architecture

DAM Fine DAM

Many WCM/ECM vendors attempt DAM, not many do it well. Day, actually, may be one of the exemplary few. The updated Day’s CQ 5.2 DAM is now web-based and integrated with the WCM bit.