Our opening keynote panel at our Amsterdam conference on 25 May, The Future of Content Management will be looking at strategic technology issues businesses, governments and NGOs need to be thinking about. Our panel is made up of technology executives who are responsible for a huge number of installed tools, and for strategic technology development at their respective firms. There will certainly be strong differences of opinion, but where this panel agrees on something, it will be worth knowing.

Some of the questions (with a few links to some of our views) we expect to ask the panel are:

  • There is a lot of debate about ECM (enterprise content management) suites vs. individual content applications. What is an “ECM suite”, and which approach makes the most sense, and why?
  • The proliferation of content applications and repositories has created a huge integration challenge. How will this get resolved? And when?
  • How will blog, wiki, and RSS technology affect content management applications?
  • Will taxonomies or “folksonomy” tagging technologies have a major impact on future CMS applications?
  • What is a content platform? Is it a repository? an index? a database, a file system? Does the concept of a content platform even even make sense? Will Longhorn’s WinFS change the game?
  • Are Portals dead for good? If so, what will take their place?
  • How will compliance requirements affect content technology, or digital/enterprise rights management products?
  • How will open source content management related software affect future content management implementations? How should it?
  • Are some open source software technologies more appropriate for enterprise content applications than others? If so, which ones and why?
  • Where in the software stack is the best place to provide basic content management functionality, e.g., management of content elements with attributes and metadata?
  • What percentage of enterprise content do you estimate is currently stored in XML? How do you see this changing in the next 12 -18 months? How will this affect technology development?
  • How will enterprise search and content management technology be integrated in the next 12 – 18 months?
  • What will be the most exciting content technology in the next 12 – 18 months?

If you have a question you would like to see us address, comment on this post, or send me an email.