January 2009 Archives

The main conference program will be published in a week or two, but the 1/2 day pre-conference workshop descriptions for June 2nd have been posted at: http://gilbanesf.com/workshops.html.

How to Select a Web Content Management System
Instructor: Seth Gottlieb, Principal, Content Here

Making SharePoint Work in the Enterprise
Instructor: Shawn Shell, Principal, Consejo, Inc.

Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management
Instructor: Lisa Welchman, Founding Partner, Welchman Pierpoint

Getting Started with Business Taxonomy Design
Instructors: Joseph A. Busch, Founder and Principal, & Ron Daniel, Principal, Taxonomy Strategies LLC

Sailing the Open Seas of New Media
Instructor: Chris Brogan, President, New Marketing Labs, LLC

Forrester Sr. Analyst Jeremiah Owyang discusses the findings of their latest report on community platforms, "Forrester Wave: Community Platforms, Q1 2009" on his blog. He also provides a lot of information about their methodology, including how they reduced the number companies to include from 100 to 9. The full report is only for Forrester clients, but Jeremiah provides a summary which you can read here. Here's a snip from his post:

What did we find? First of all, this is still a very young market, with the average tenure of a company being just a few years in community. Despite the immaturity, we evaluated nine and were impressed with Jive Software and Telligent Systems who lead the pack because of their strong administrative and platform features and solution offerings.

Next, a group of vendors ranked as strong performers: KickApps and Pluck enable large Web sites to quickly scale with social features. Also in the strong performer category, Awareness, Lithium Technologies, and Mzinga enable brands to build branded communities while LiveWorld offers brands agency-like services. While Leverage Software is not on par with the others in the category, they are ideal for medium-sized businesses and due to their cost-effective platform could have a strong position during this economic downturn.

We have added OpenID support to our login and registration pages at gilbane.com. Our blogs also support OpenID for registering to comment.

What the heck is OpenID?
The simple answer is that it is a way to login into tens of thousands of web sites using the same login and password, and is supported by Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, AOL, and many more. You may already have an OpenID and not know it, e.g., if you have a Yahoo! login. You can find out more about OpenID here and here.

How does it work at gilbane.com?
When you first register at gilbane.com, you have the option of using an OpenID. If you choose to use it, some of the information in the registration form will be automatically populated. What gets populated depends on what OpenID supports and what you have included in your OpenID identity. Whenever you return to gilbane.com you can use your OpenID to login. Note that you don't need to associate your OpenID so you can ignore the next paragraph.

If you are already registered at gilbane.com, and you want to be able to use an OpenID in addition to your current login, you need to associate your OpenID with the site. This is a one-time process, and is accomplished by logging in to gilbane.com, and clicking on "Manage your account", where you will find a link to associate your gilbane.com registration with your OpenID. Members can add and remove OpenIDs to their account. Members can have any number of OpenIDs associated with their account; however, each OpenID can be associated with at most one account. Remember that your OpenID will only work if your OpenID is already associated with your account.

If you have any questions about using OpenID at gilbane.com, contact customer service.

A 12 minute podcast on how to make the most out of attending a conference from someone who attends lots of them. He was interviewed by someone promoting the VizThink conference, but his advice applies to any conference. http://www.vizthink.com/blog/2009/01/09/how-to-be-an-insanely-great-conference-attendee/

As I mentioned in November, Dale Waldt has joined us as a senior consultant, and yesterday he started posting on the XML blog. Check out his first post on "Why Adding Semantics to Web Data is Difficult".

The period for nominating a peer or yourself to run for one of the open seats on the Board of Directors of CM Pros closes tomorrow, January 7. Visit the elections page on the CM Pros website for details.

In case you are looking for the CTO Blog, the Web Content Management Blog, the Collaboration Blog, or the Publishing Practice Blog, don't worry, you have come to the right place.

We have integrated the content from these blogs into this, our main blog. All the original content, categories, tags, comments, and trackbacks have been preserved, and all the original permalinks still work (via 301 redirects). Anyone following one of the older links will be automatically re-directed to the exact same content at the new address on this blog. If you are looking for a particular post, you should be able to find it by using our blog search function or exploring the categories or tags, or archives.

While XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), has been in use on a voluntary basis for awhile, the long slow road to making it a requirement ended this past December with the SEC's announcement officially mandating it for large public companies (requirements for smaller companies will be phased in). We have argued for years that, as important as XBRL is from a regulatory point of view, its benefit for internal corporate and inter-company financial operations is reason enough to adopt it.

Given the current mess in the financial markets, XBRL has even more potential. Mark Cuban suggests using XBRL to help track the bailout money. Sounds like a great idea, and hopefully others will think of additional uses of this already-existing tool.

Thanks for the tweet Andrew!