Forrester News & Articles

A recent paper released by Forrester Research (news, site) entitled SharePoint 2010: A More Viable Cloud Option argues that if you are looking at deploying SharePoint off the premises, with the introduction of SharePoint 2010 (news, site),  now is a good time to do it.

Your website is your primary communication tool, so you give it plenty of love. However, research says this is not sufficient as more than 70% of U.S. Internet consumers are now using multiple channels.

Examples include:

• Call centers
• Direct mail
• Mobile apps and interfaces
• Social networks
• In-store displays

Today's ruthless consumers expect a seamless cross-channel experience. Unfortunately, consumers often report that their cross-channel experience are poor -- A.K.A., you have work to do.

With this problem in mind Forrester Research is teaming with CoreMedia this Thursday at 11am EST/4pm GMT to present a webinar titled: The Role Of WCM In Cross-Channel Customer Relations.

Forrester analyst Tim Walters says you can maximize your online presence to create the optimal cross-channel user experience. And further, that your web content management system can play a key role in the process.

If you're responsible for optimizing your customers' cross-channel experience this webinar may be just what you need. Skip on over and register here.

We have a mixed bag of news for SMBs with conflicting views on whether social media is good or bad for business. There was a lot of other research published this week giving a considerable amount to think about for companies in, or thinking about entering the tech fray.

Demanding modern consumers want not only rich, engaging online experiences, but, according to Forrester's research, they also expect these experiences to extend transparently across multiple channels -- from the web to call centers, to direct mail, mobile, social networks and in-store displays. In fact, recent research says that more than 70% of U.S. consumers use the Web plus another channel when making purchase decisions.

We've said it before, 2010 is shaping up to be a year where experience management needs drive the Web CMS sector in new, and in our opinion, interesting directions.

On Thursday February 25 at 8am Pacific, 11am Eastern and 4pm GMT CoreMedia and Forrester are holding a webinar entitled The Role of Web CMS in Cross-Channel Customer Relations.

The live event will be presented by Forrester's Tim Walters and aims to:

• Review the emerging trends in cross-channel communications and experience management
• Explore how Web Content Management solutions can a play key role in driving customer responsiveness
• Demonstrate that synchronizing, updating and optimizing your digital content for a wide variety of consumer end points can quickly increase your customer engagement

If you're tasked with optimizing your customer communication and interaction channels, then this event might be just what you need. Inquiring minds can register here.
 

February and we just can’t seem to get away from the dual obsessions of hosted solutions and security. Particularly telling in the SMB sector, it looks like these are two areas we are going to be hearing a lot about over the course of the year.

In the world of Document Management two of the hottest topics are cloud computing and security. Interestingly, however, it seems that according to a report from Forrester we're not taking to cloud storage at all, and we also discovered that data security is increasingly troublesome. Could it be that there's a link between the two?

We continue our weekly SMB Tech Rollup this time with the news that many SMBs are getting worried about IT security, but are happily embracing the cloud.

In addition, Microsoft and Intuit are getting together in the cloud, HP and Cisco could be helping SMBs with new pricing arrangements, and Spigit is focusing on better collaboration tools.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• ICQ Launches New Client With Real time Features
• Study: Social Networks Not Keeping Students Up At Night
• Majority Of Internet Users Use Social Media
• Internet Explorer Declared Unsafe By Germany, France

There's no sign of enterprise content management investment decreasing in the coming year. At least not according to new Forrester (news, site) research.

Your website has become a critical component of how you interact with customers. However, in most cases its use and the team that manages it have both grown organically. Additionally, it's often the IT department running the show.

As a result of this pattern, many websites do not meet the customer experience bar that modern marketing requires. They are not usable enough. They are not accessible enough. And they are not persuasive enough. There are also too many bits and pieces stapled together to create the feedback loops.

On the Ground: A Growing Problem

Recent Forrester research data found that improving customer experience via the website was at the top of many organizations' priority list. Other hot items included improving online usability (important for 78% of respondents), improving support for the brand online (64%) and improving cross-channel interactions (58%).

The problem, according to Forrester, is that the gap has grown too large between the business people who want these things and the technical and organizational realities on the ground.

In Demand: Better Powers of Persuasion

There are a number of elements that go into creating the optimal customer experience including rich media, social media and community, and analytics. But it's not as simple as finding a single vendor to support all your needs -- in fact, there is no single vendor.

With the number of Web CMS vendors, marketing vendors and new breed experience management vendors offering solutions to help you meet your challenges, it's hard to know which way to run.

Forrester and Siteworx are in turn analyzing and tackling the problem. You can join the conversation this Thursday, Dec 10th at 1pm EST. During a 1 hour webinar they will look specifically at how -- given the lack of a single vendor solution -- you can bridge the customer experience gap. 

During the free event analyst Stephen Powers will cover:

• The components of an ideal customer experience
• Tools to uncover how your content is being consumed
• The various vendors in the interactive marketing landscape
• Steps to develop your own persuasive content strategy
• Technology convergence patterns

Sound intriguing? You can register here.

Demand for document management and record management software is set to grow by over 7% every year for the next five years in the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region, according to new research by IT market research company IDC (news, site).

Ron Rogowski and his team of researchers at Forrester Research, look at what they call emotional experience design and how it affects the way it can create online experiences that “deeply engage customers” in a new report called Emotional Experience Design,

We always look to the analysts to help us narrow down our selection of vendors for things like enterprise content management. We recently had a look at Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management. Now we look to Forrester (news, site), who has released their Q4 Wave for Enterprise Content Management Suites.

Probably one of the most interesting interviews you could have is with Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, on the topic of SharePoint (news, site). Oh to be a fly on the wall in that interview room -- a fly that could also ask questions, mind you.

Forrester analyst Matthew Brown had that opportunity after Ballmer's keynote at SharePoint Conference 2009. Here are a few of the things that Ballmer said that caught our attention.

Early last month IBM (news, site) began the process of articulating its Smart Archive Strategy. Began, we say, because at the time of the announcement the company released IBM Information Archive, a disk-and-tape information infrastructure solution that offered a "unified storage” approach to archiving company information.

But they weren’t finished with that and only recently unveiled a number of other solutions that are designed to provide analytics and data discovery to companies looking to determine what information they should keep and what information they should bin.