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HCL Digital Experience

HCL Digital Experience
Formerly IBM WebSphere Portal & Web Content Manager

Overview

What is HCL Digital Experience?

HCL Digital Experience is based on the former IBM Web Content Manager and IBM WebSphere Portal products, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018. The product allows the user to create, manage and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

IBM Web Content Manager has been widely utilized by Enterprise Content Management departments to implement customized digital solutions …
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The WCM Factory

2 out of 10
August 25, 2015
My client is located in more than 35 countries.
As you may imagine each countries has their own business activities and particularity.

The …
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WCM's Review

9 out of 10
March 20, 2015
It is for B2E and e-Newspaper.
We are using this product as Enterprise level Content management across a whole organization which includes …
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Java Applet editor is pain.

1 out of 10
April 04, 2014
We used IBM Web Content Manager for our website content management system and we did support for other companies that used IBM WCM …
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Banco Itaú

10 out of 10
March 04, 2014
Hemos usado este administrador de contenidos para el Nuevo sitio publico de Banco Itaú Chile. Gradualmente hemos introducido esta …
Continue reading
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Popular Features

View all 16 features
  • Role-based user permissions (5)
    5.0
    50%
  • Code quality / cleanliness (5)
    3.1
    31%
  • Admin section (5)
    3.1
    31%
  • Page templates (5)
    1.1
    11%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is HCL Digital Experience?

HCL Digital Experience is based on the former IBM Web Content Manager and IBM WebSphere Portal products, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018. The product allows the user to create, manage and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences to audiences with responsive content,…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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What is Umbraco CMS?

Umbraco is an open-source .NET Core CMS with over 700,000 active installs worldwide and with more than 200,000 active community members. It was first released on February 16th, 2005, and is still to this day an open-source project backed by a commercial company. To ensure Umbraco is always running…

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Product Demos

Learn What's New in HCL Digital Experience

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XDT Video Manager - Built for HCL Digital Experience

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HCL Digital Experience 101

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Features

Security

This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.

5
Avg 8.0

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

4.1
Avg 8.1

Web Content Creation

Features that support the creation of website content.

2.9
Avg 7.6

Web Content Management

Features for managing website content

1.9
Avg 7.1
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Product Details

What is HCL Digital Experience?

HCL Digital Experience Competitors

HCL Digital Experience Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

HCL Digital Experience is based on the former IBM Web Content Manager and IBM WebSphere Portal products, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018. The product allows the user to create, manage and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences to audiences with responsive content, targeted offers, seamlessly integrated applications and consistent branding across channels (web, mobile, and hybrid mobile/web applications and more).

Amaxus CMS (discontinued), Microsoft SharePoint, and Oracle WebCenter Content are common alternatives for HCL Digital Experience.

Reviewers rate WYSIWYG editor highest, with a score of 7.

The most common users of HCL Digital Experience are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(35)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

IBM Web Content Manager has been widely utilized by Enterprise Content Management departments to implement customized digital solutions for clients in various industries, such as Health, Insurance, and Telecommunication. This versatile platform has proven instrumental in addressing a range of business challenges and requirements. With its latest releases, the platform has significantly improved usability, making it more user-friendly and accessible even for non-technical users.

One of the standout use cases involves a client with a global presence in over 35 countries. Each country had its own unique business activities and requirements. The client needed a robust and multi-language CMS that could be easily managed by their marketing teams, without extensive IT knowledge. IBM Web Content Manager seamlessly met these demands, empowering content authors while ensuring consistency across multiple regions.

The product has also been recommended for its capabilities in customizing workflows, delivering personalized content, fostering interactive and collaborative features, and enabling syndication of libraries. Furthermore, IBM Web Content Manager has played a crucial role in the development and revitalization of Banco Itaú Chile's public site. Through gradual adoption in version 7, the technology helped transform their online presence.

Organizations have leveraged this product for enterprise-level content management across Intranet and Internet applications. It has facilitated federating Java applications onto a single support node for streamlined promotion and contributed to maintaining a global approach to federation with regards to document usage, versioning, and publishing. In addition, IBM Web Content Manager has proven effective in addressing user interface problems through implementing UI in JSR286.

Moreover, the platform has successfully driven corporate customer websites while integrating marketing and eCommerce sites to provide users with a consolidated experience. Clients have utilized IBM Web Content Manager to build content-driven websites or web portals comprising various components such as sites, site areas, web content objects, and library resources.

An insurance client found value in using IBM Web Content Manager to publish marketing materials like brochures, publications, news, and articles. Additionally, the tool has been employed for website content management and providing support to other companies utilizing different versions of IBM WCM.

Furthermore, IBM Web Content Manager has played a pivotal role in the installation of IBM WebSphere Portal systems and IBM Connections Systems while offering technical assistance to customers.

Overall, IBM Web Content Manager offers a comprehensive suite of features and functionalities that cater to diverse use cases across industries. Its recent usability improvements have made it more accessible to non-technical users, empowering marketers to take control of content creation and management.

Helpful Preview Environments: Many users have found the different preview environments in IBM Web Content Manager to be helpful in visualizing how the page will look once the information is published. This feature has been praised by multiple reviewers for its ability to provide a clear understanding of the final user experience.

Out-of-the-Box Content Syndication: The out-of-the-box content syndication feature in IBM Web Content Manager has been appreciated by several reviewers. This feature allows contributors to publish multiple content and pages simultaneously, improving efficiency and streamlining the publishing process.

Personalized Role Management: Reviewers have highlighted personalized role management as a strong tool in IBM Web Content Manager. This feature enables users to manage custom content actions, such as viewing, editing, deleting, and publishing or expiring contents. Its flexibility and effectiveness have been commended by multiple users.

Difficult and lengthy task to apply multiple changes to an authoring template: Several users have found it challenging and time-consuming to make multiple modifications to an authoring template in IBM WCM.

Struggles with outdated content: Some reviewers have experienced issues when dealing with content that has not been updated for a long period of time, causing the tool to struggle in managing it effectively.

Complex set-up, configuration, and integration: Many users have expressed frustration over the lengthy process required for setting up, configuring, and integrating IBM WCM. They have mentioned that tasks like installing a new node or deploying tasks were not straightforward despite the availability of well-documented steps.

Users have provided several recommendations for improving the product. They suggest enhancing the samples and guides for developers, providing certification programs, and offering training tutorials to enhance the user experience. Users also appreciate the great user support provided by the product. Furthermore, users note that the product's longevity in the market has allowed it to outlast competitors in the Horizontal Portal and Digital Experience Platform categories. They highly recommend the product to other users and banking clients.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-11 of 11)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to drive the corporate customer website. We use HCL DX to merge the marketing site and the eCommerce site and give users a consolidated experience. We are moving forward with plans to use DX to drive customer self-help functions on the site and to unify this experience with the tools the inside sales support team uses. The idea is to break down siloed applications and refactor them as components that will allow the various component pieces to be shared using the DX framework to compile experiences appropriate for the customer and employee.
  • Content Management
  • Personalization
  • Site aggregation
  • SEO management
  • Documentation of functions
  • Education
HCL DX does really well at managing and maintaining the site. It allows the business to basically maintain the site while IT spent time developing new and enhanced functions. The main issue I currently have with HCL DX is not directly with the product but it does play a role. It is difficult finding skilled resources to support HCL DX in my experience.
Jean-Luc Taillandier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Many Java Application must be federated on a single support node for promotion.

Digital Experience contributes to reducing and maintaining a global approach to federation including how to use a document and versioning, publishing etc.
  • IBM Wepshere Portal is a good approach to federation as it contains with multi-channel capabilities, with internal proxy
  • Integration with Domino and Tivoli augment productivity for some integrated tasks (notification, awareness, etc.)
  • Form eXperience Builder is a great product to construct basic application to integrate workflows, forms and surveys
  • Most Products must be integrated with the FileNet, Case, Connections suite
  • Reduce time to required to assemble each product . It's quite difficult and we wast a lost of prototyping time trying to find a good configuration
  • Some products with a level for assembly are not compatible if installed together
  • It takes too long to install WPS / Case Manager / Digital Data Connector / Connections and Domino. I would like to see a basic architecture to expose service mail, blog, share file, share mail, meeting etc. I am waiting your Connections Pink solution impatiently!
  • I would like to see a more out-of-the-box solution so that we do not have to focus our energy in installing clusters or configuring the platform
  • Most of our customers are not ready to share data in the cloud, and there is a need for a real store and secure solution for administration and banking users who prefer on-premise solution. I am a big fan of your ECM /Portal /Social/ collaborative on-premise solutions. I would like to see better packaging to reduce costs and promote real use cases for administration and banking
  • Please integrate E-commerce elements in your suite.
  • Please make practice and certification easier (It should be free). Do not expire certifications.
  • Please facilitate contacts with support experts, specialists, and not just PMR contacts who are not qualified to help us. I would like engagement with support to be much more efficient and the support team to me more responsive.
For a non-specialist it's not possible to use Digital Data Connector without the Web Content Manager (WCM).

It's more difficult for debugging DDC or analyzing why XML streams cannot be parsed, and understanding which services can be consumed by Digital Manager.
Sowmyamaruthi Lattala | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our client was using Oracle CMS and FatWire to host content across the organization. There were lot of challenges with respect to customizing workflows to incorporate business processes, serving customers with personalized content, providing interactive and collaborative features to the author community etc. The recommendation was to use IBM web content manager 8.5 which is aimed to address most of the problems the business and author community had with other CMS products. Business authors were able to leverage in place editing capabilities, personalization features, renditions to serve mobile/desktop/tablet friendly images, an intuitive rich text editor, projects for a collaborative authoring process and most importantly syndication of libraries.
  • With Version 8.5, IBM Web Content Manager introduced in place editing capabilities which allow authors to make content edits on sections of the page instead of going to the content itself. This feature allows authors to make changes in context of the page and preview changes within the actual look and feel of a live page.
  • Projects provide a collaborative atmosphere for the author community so that authors can interact and work as a team to manage inter-dependent content changes under one project and publish all changes at once, instead of working separately on individual content changes. This brings awareness across authors in an organization and easy knowledge share.
  • IBM Digital Data Connector is a cool feature that allows [users] to integrate external content sources onto the portal using IBM Web Content Manager presentation components. This allows UI/UX designers to present integrated external data in any manner they want, manage UI changes with an underlying approval process and leverage syndication to push changes live immediately.
  • IBM Web Content Manager offers a targeted content feature that allows business users to deliver personalized content to customers based on customer demographic information, browsing history and other transaction related information. Any rules created follow the publishing process thereby making it just a configurable item resulting in less turn around to turn on the feature on a website.
  • IBM Web Content Manager offers 'multi lingual solution' out of the box which allows content creation for almost all popular languages.
  • Syndication feature has improved a lot and it now provides a detailed views comprising of 'failed items', 'items that have syndicated successfully, 'items in queue'. Failed items view provides detailed and clear cut information of what resulted in failure helping IT to troubleshoot problems easily.
  • Projects provide a collaborative way of managing content changes on a website. However projects cannot be used with a workflow as such. Though different phases in a project can be tied to workflow actions, the real benefits of a workflow on the project are missing.
  • IBM WCM is a bit of a heavy weight component because of the DOJO framework it comes with. Though IBM has improved this over the years, it is still unable to come out of the DOJO framework and leverage some of the best-used frameworks like jQuery.
  • Somehow IBM WCM is best suited with a portal, as a standalone WCM server. IBM Web Content Manager is not that robust providing data to external websites.
IBM Web Content Manager is well suited for intranet employee portals, websites which drive extensive marketing content, and e-commerce sites to provide product images and details. It cannot be used a document management system to store large volumes of data as it's purely a web content management system.
Shan Alam | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Webshpere Portal for our Enterprise Portal project. We have implemented our UI in JSR286. It is being uses by whole organization. I addresses all user interface problems.We have several modules developed in Websphere Portal using JSF and everything we do for user interface implemented in Webshpere Portal. We hosted all enterprise application on our enterprise portal.
  • We can implement better user interface using websphere portal.
  • We can separate our module in separate portlets.
  • We can integrate all types of technology with webphere portal.
  • It has so many inter application running. Reducing applications will help for performance.
It is well suited If we have portal project to implement and we have so many individual modules. It is not appropriate for small web applications.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Web Content Manager is used by clients of our organization. They use it to build content driven web sites or web portals comprising of sites, site areas, web content objects, and library resources. One of our clients in the insurance domain uses this tool to publish marketing materials such as brochures, publications, news and articles which comprise of a title, description, summary and an embedded file attachment (PDF, Word document etc.).
  • Well designed web content management system with clearly defined relationships between the various web content objects such as sites, site areas, authoring templates, presentation templates, library resources, components, web content objects, etc.
  • Can create robust content creation and publishing workflows with workflow stages and workflow actions
  • Web Content can be rendered on multiple devices and browsers in a responsive and adaptive manner.
  • IBM Web Content Manager should provide some easily usable connectors through a GUI to connect to bring content from custom data sources including connecting to Salesforce and custom databases.
  • Should further optimize and enhance creation of rich and responsive content driven UIs on various digital channels.
  • Should further optimize and enhance content personalization features.
IBM Web Content Manager is well suited for building content driven web sites and web portals and micro-sites. It provides robust personalization capabilities when the web content is rendered through portlets on WebSphere Portal pages.
Arwa Nababteh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I participated in an implemention of IBM WCM as an external facing site for our customers. It's blended with portlets to provide a personalized experience for our customer's clients. The system enables content authoring to be put in the hands of marketing with no or minimal IT knowledge.
  • Blending workflow perfectly with every component, item or content in system, thus maintaining accuracy of content
  • Keeping versions and history of all changes made, while providing details on when, and by whom it was changed. In this way, restore is easy and straightforward
  • Large set of components provided out of the box to ease building the authoring environment
  • Integration between portal pages and WCM is still not optimal, although the introduction of managed pages is a huge improvement. But adding all the changes on page and WCM in one project and one workflow is still not easy
  • Linking portal pages to site area only, and requiring a site area for each content isn't liked by customers
  • Some features like, number of views, adding comments, etc. should be out of the box
  • Some features that depend a lot on theme libraries, especially Dojo libraries, like tagging and ratting should be enhanced
The content template catalogue provides a very good infrastructure to build on for customers who have much in common with features already provided with ctc, I highly recommend it as it will require less implementation time, and enhanced components design. Of course it's recommended for large scale business with many departments and frequent changes in content. It's also recommended for customers who need to benefit from portal by adding portlets and integrating with systems. If the customer is ONLY seeking a WCM system I don't recommend the product as there are more user-friendly alternatives on the market, at lower cost.
August 25, 2015

The WCM Factory

Julien Diet | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
My client is located in more than 35 countries.
As you may imagine each countries has their own business activities and particularity.

The problem was to find a CMS with the following qualities :
¤ robust
¤ multi-language
¤ ergonomic
¤ easy to use
  • Multi-language implementations
  • It's easy to create a complex page with the Authoring/Presentation templates.
  • A good range of different components (HTML, JSP, Navigator, ...)
  • No interruption (stabile)
  • WCM 7 don't work properly with all browsers (specially IE).
  • There are also some problems with the JRE installed on the machine on clients.
  • When you have a lot of libraries, you have to conform to the inter-library references.
  • Therefore that's hard to maintain clean a large quantity of library) .... and gradually it becomes impossible to flush those references.
  • A specific development cost a lot.
  • Could be a good thing to make easier the development of portlets.
How many people will work on it ?
Do you want a multi-language website ?
How do you imagine the workflow of your contents?
What is the level of security needed ?
Which browser do you use ?
March 20, 2015

WCM's Review

Habeep Raguman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
It is for B2E and e-Newspaper.
We are using this product as Enterprise level Content management across a whole organization which includes Intranet and Internet applications.
  • It allows you to approve the content in various level before it is published
  • Authorization is very powerful and you can decide whom you want to render (group wise)
  • Performance-wise it is great, and it has a powerful search engine
  • Some of the built-in components (Menu Component, File Resource Component and etc) are powerful and very useful
  • Deployment is very simple, as is moving from one environment to another environment by using WCM syndication
  • WCM Syndication needs to be improved
Well connetced with Portal
Alvaro Pariente Alonso | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
As experts in digital solutions, we have been working and offering new web initiatives, where IBM Web Content Manager has been one of the most demanding and successful platform within all of our clients.

IBM Web Content Manager is being used by Enterprise Content Management (ECM) department, implementing different solutions based on client's requirements. Our expertise focuses on Internet and Intranet. Health, Insurance and Telecommunication are the most common sectors which has succeeded our IBM criteria. Furthermore, migrations between different platform, performance tunning, usability and time to market strategies has taken an important part within this content manager.

Previous releases had some business problems with usability and final users were not able to take all advantages the tool provided them. However, new releases has been improved in this issue in order to make it easy, user friendly and usable.
  • Different preview environments such as authoring and delivery lets us see in detail how the page will look like once we publish the information to the final user. Its out of the box content syndication helps the contributor to publish multiple content and pages at the same time.
  • Personalized role management is a strong tool to manage custom content actions in terms of roles to view, edit, delete or publish/expire contents. Role management and deep analysis is a mandatory task when deploying a website and IBM Web Content Manager contains, out of the box, an inheritance and personalized role management within the content.
  • Workflow customization is one the most notable strengths for end users giving them the possibility of defining any workflow for content publication such as email, pre-publish, review etc. This fulfills an important requirement that clients often ask for.
  • IBM has worked hard on social collaboration solution and the final result is IBM Connections. This next generation solution provides a great integration for all collaboration requirements: communities, forums, profile, networking,etc. IBM Web Content Manager can be integrated with it as a full content repository providing a broad solution in terms of web and social collaboration.
  • IBM Content Manager is provided through WebSphere Portal with a strong architecture ensuring performance, tuning, easy deployment and security aspects.
  • Applying multiple changes to an authoring template is a difficult and lengthy task. Problems usually occur when contents have not been updated for a long period of time and the tool does not know how to deal with it.
  • Reliance on the WebSphere Portal architecture has some disadvantages as well. These are more related to hardware than software, and could result in some architecture problems if the tool evolves
  • Set-up, configuration, integration (LDAP, others) takes long time. There are a lot of well documented steps but sometimes installing a new node, or deploying tasks are not out of the box. This should be taken in consideration in new releases.
  • The possibility of attaching multiple documents as a single content item should be an out of the box capability. An add-on was required to provide this common need.
Suited Scenarios:
- Content search (metadata, black list, ranking): integrated with IBM Omnifind
- Social Collaboration through IBM Connections
- Content structure (site, site areas, projects)
- User Management
- Personalization
- Multisite
- Friendly Url
- Strong and robust architecture (cluster and cloud possibilities)
- Migration
- Content Repository

Unsuited Scenarios:
- Some Easy Presentation aspects (What you see is what you get, drag and drop)
- MultiDevice
- No out of the box requirements
- Document Manager
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used IBM Web Content Manager for our website content management system and we did support for other companies that used IBM WCM different versions. We also installed IBM Websphere Portal systems and IBM Connections Systems and we did support for all these different softwares. We had 3-level support which means that we solved customers real technical problems. Some of the customers had very custom systems that had variety of problems and we had to solve some of them with IBM support.
  • Workflows are very configurable.
  • WCM allows you do variety of web publishing
  • User rights management is enterprise level
  • Search is not working well. We could not get it work even we worked it with IBM support.
  • Java Applet in Ephox editor is pain. You have to watch that you update your Java version correctly or You cannot edit anything. This might work somehow on enterprise environment with tight workstation configuration. I think that Java Applet editor is the worst part of IBM WCM
  • IBM WCM needs lot of capacity on database and appserver.
If you have other IBM Products like IBM Portal or Connections there can be some scenarios to use IBM WCM. I have used WCM with 3 and half years and I cannot recommend it to anyone. There is many systems that could give you the same features and lot of more at a much lower price.
March 04, 2014

Banco Itaú

david cortes garate | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Hemos usado este administrador de contenidos para el Nuevo sitio publico de Banco Itaú Chile. Gradualmente hemos introducido esta tecnología en su version 7. Creemos que podemos impulsar el desarrollo y renovación del sitio transaccional personas y empresas. Con él podemos manejar la demografía de nuestros visitantes, y además mejorar la experiencia. Creemos que con la asesoría de IBM llegaremos a potenciar vía Coremetrics y otras herramietas de análisis el comportamiento del visitante frente a los diferentes contenidos publicados.Estamos deseosos de integrar herramientas de alta productividad IT para nuestra nueva cara visible.Adicionalmente sabemos que la integración del canal Mobile sera un éxito, IBM tiene las 5000 versiones de aparatos y sus actualizaciones que nos asegura un layout estándar a la hora de deployar nuestro sitio.

[We have used this content manager for Banco Itaú Chile’s new public site. We have gradually introduced this technology in version 7. We believe we can advance the development and renewal of the transactional site for individuals and businesses. We want to integrate high-productivity IT tools into our new public face. With (IBM Web Content Manager) we can understand our visitor demographics and also enhance their experience. We believe that with the assistance of IBM Coremetrics and other analytics tools, we will eventually boost visitor behavior relative to the various content types we have published. We also know that our Mobile integration will be successful because IBM supports ongoing updates for 5,000 different devices, which assures us a standard layout from the moment our site is deployed.]
  • manejo de sesión [session management]
  • reescritura de url [URL rewriting]
  • cajas negras de password [password black boxes]
  • Administracion de contenidos para imagines: hoy en la version 7 ya podemos seleccionar un grupo de imagenes y cargarlas con 1 solo clic. A diferencia de la version anterior, donde teniamos que catalogar imagen por imagen en una tarea tediosa y titanica (castigo para la pobre persona que tenia que subir una publicación).
  • [Content administration for images: today in version 7 we can finally select a group of images and upload them with a single click. This is unlike the previous version, where we had to identify each image, a tedious and titanic task (a punishment for the poor person who had to upload a publication)].
Necesito un vendedor para Coremetrics [I need a vendor for Coremetrics]
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