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A truly personalized online customer experience — what essentially amounts to a custom website for every customer — has been the Holy Grail of Marketing for over a decade.

The sun is shining and spring is in the air. What better way to spend the warmest day of the year in the UK than penning the latest episode of the Art of SharePoint Success?

The Adobe Digital Marketing Summit is over, but the customer experience lessons learned continue on. I had the opportunity to speak with Adobe VP of Enterprise Marketing, Kevin Cochrane, on some of these lessons and where Adobe sees the future of digital marketing. Here's what I learned.

We're in the middle of a series showing how to create a streamlined, standardized project management system with Office 365. In last week's post we created a document library on a project site accessible by all team members. Today we'll see how to add your document library to your team’s Outlook clients.

Mobile computing is definitely at the forefront of the Consumerization of IT (CoIT) trend. The evidence? Look around you and employees are literally voting with their devices, showing a preference for designed-for-the-consumer tools like the iPhone and those that have been inspired by Apple’s leadership in this space. These often feature beautiful interfaces for accessing and sharing information like Flipboard, Path and Instagram.

Top Tasks Management involves continuously improving the top tasks of your customers.

Many companies face the challenge of getting their customers the right product at the right time. And many companies employ a taxonomy to help drive product sales and improve findability on consumer-facing public websites. 

Session retrospective from GigaOM’s Structure Conference

If you haven’t yet heard anyone say that “data is the new oil,” then you will pretty soon. Companies as varied as PayPal, Human Genome Sciences, IBM and Match.com are all drilling down into their data stores, refining and analyzing what they find, and then leveraging their insights to create new products or add value to those that already exist. They are literally turning data into dollars.

Tools and platforms were at the tops of our author's minds this week, trying to solve problems such as how to pick the right tools to meet your enterprise's needs, how to create intranets that make employees happier and more productive, and how to best reach your target audience with a multi-platform approach.

Jump in, the water's fine.

The looming post-apocalyptic future for Apps and AppStores aside, there were still a cornucopia of app launches at SXSW this year. Alan Cooper nailed it when he said that one of the biggest trends he has seen as technology has changed is how the differences in deployment models and computing devices have shifted the strategy and goals of people designing and creating software.

Coming from a SharePoint world I wondered what I would find at the Project Server conference, but I've really enjoyed my time here! At this point the thing that stands out to me the most is the approach that Microsoft has been taking on Project within the environment.

I remember a CMS implementation I was involved in ten years ago for a major hardware manufacturer. At the time, mobile was just starting to become a "thing" and multi-platform delivery was the new buzzword. People knew that mobile was going to be big, but perhaps they didn’t know how big.

Let’s be honest, SharePoint For Internet Sites (FIS) has been given a pretty tough time in terms of its ability to deliver rich and engaging experiences on the web.

In a 2009 study by The Ken Blanchard Companies, senior executives estimated their workforces as operating at only 60 to 65 percent of their potential, with the average organization forfeiting about US$ 1 million annually in untapped profits. Years later, a lack of employee engagement and low productivity continues to be a real concern for enterprises.

If you are looking to increase your digital activity and customer experience, the most important thing you can do is measure engagement to understand your Return on Investment (ROI), which will help justify next year's budget.

I’m in the middle of a series on how to build and deploy successful SharePoint document management applications, with the goal of migrating end-users off of the most prevalent legacy document management system out there: that unholy trinity of shared drives, hard drives, and email.

In this post, we’ll dive deeper into migration planning, one of the most challenging parts of the process.

“What Java did for the Internet, they (EMC Greenplum) will do for the web.” That’s a pretty profound proclamation, especially when you consider who’s making it; none other than Scott McNealy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, where Java was created in the early 1990’s.

Marketers devote a massive amount of resources in both time and money to customer acquisition. After all, that’s the creative fun stuff, right? Yet, many marketers don’t spend any time on developing an optimization strategy to increase conversion rates! Getting prospective customers to a brand’s website is great, but why not take it to the next level and focus on getting users to take action on your site?

For almost 15 years, companies large and small have been publishing intranet sites to either share information and files with their employees or allow cross sharing between many and possibly all employees. However, an intranet site is only as good as the freshness of its content and the ease with which that content can be obtained. And in today’s world, there are so many alternatives for individuals to share what they want, when they want.

Web Content Management is in a state of flux. It was traditionally aimed at the web. But now, with the rapidly increasing number of channels that are only partly "web" related from a technological and conceptual viewpoint (Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Mobile apps), Web CMS vendors are moving to try to cram all channel specific possibilities into one WCM system.