Recently in Gilbane Boston 2008 Category

It was great to find out for sure last week at Gilbane Boston that the economy has not had too much of an impact on the conference business (we even had attendees from a few financial service companies). While I'm sure there were some people who couldn't make it because of travel or other budget concerns, our Boston conference was larger than our San Francisco conference last June. Of course most of our attendees are in IT, a sector that has not been hit nearly as hard as most others. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal wrote about a Forrester forecast that "Businesses and other organizations in the U.S. will spend $573 billion on computer software, hardware and services next year, just 1.6% more than they spent in 2008, according to new data out Tuesday from Forrester Research Inc." Clearly, this is not ideal if you sell enterprise software, but really, for a fresh forecast for 2009, this is not bad. In fact, the content technology areas we cover seem to be rolling along pretty well.

I won't try and write about all the discussions and activity at the conference here, but there was much a-twitter about Twitter. Our audience seemed to be split on its usefulness, but the animated discussions about it did cause a few people to sign up for a Twitter account. Although I joined Twitter when it first launched, when faced with the "What are you doing now?", my reaction was "Well, this is silly". So my first tweet was only a few days before last week's conference. I'm sure there are other good uses of twitter, but so far I think conference activity is one of the best (http://twitter.com/fgilbane). It was certainly useful to me as a way to monitor what at least one segment of attendees were thinking and doing, but it also looked like it was a useful way for attendees to share info about different presentations, network, and arrange "tweet-ups". This is not news to all. There are some downsides however - see Amanda Shiga's thoughtful blog post on the pros and cons of conference twittering.

Got 30 seconds?

Take our poll on content sharing trends between customer support, technical documentation, and marketing.

Then, consider coming in to Gilbane Boston this week to discuss the results!

Gilbane Conference sponsor OASIS is hosting an informal "learn more" session about the new Content Management Interoperability Services, CMIS, at Gilbane Boston, tomorrow, Wednesday, December 3, at the Westin Copley hotel. The CMIS gathering is at 1:00 pm in the St. George room. Meet some of the developers of the standard.http://gilbaneoston.com

Whether you can make it to Gilbane Boston this week at the Westin Copley or not, if you have a question for our analyst keynote panel (IDC, Gilbane, Forrester, 451, Burton), let me know, either here, via email, or via twitter (this looks like a perfect use for twitter).

BTW, this panel and all the conference keynotes on Wednesday are available at no charge.

In tough economic times it is tempting to over-emphasize cost savings. A better approach is to consider cost savings if necessary, but to develop a strategy to grow your revenues first if you can. This may mean some re-deploying rather than cutting. One important path to growth is to ensure your products are available and appealing to a broader, international market. Below is a sample of what we are covering in our track on managing global content next week at Gilbane Boston to help you learn how, or how to do it better.

GCM-1: Optimizing the Global Content Value Chain: Focus on Product Content
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2:00pm, Westin Copley, Boston

Product content includes technical documentation as well as the content that lives with a product or service in many formats and contexts, including pre-sales, post-sales, aftermarket, training, and service. The global economy adds languages as yet another output to the traditional multichannel formula, increasing content volume due to the nuances of dialect and culture. This session discusses how to design GCVCs that integrate content and localization/translation technologies to support single-sourcing, simultaneous product shipment programs, and alignment with product lifecycle management or product data management systems. Speakers share current best practices and provide insight into what's coming in the next wave of people, processes and technologies for multilingual product content.

Moderator: Leonor Ciarlone, Lead Analyst, Gilbane Group
Speakers:
* Fred Hollowood, Director Language R&D, Shared Engineering Services, Symantec Corporation
* Natasja H.M. Paulsen, Partner, Ordina Consulting
* Sophie Hurst, Senior Product Marketing Manager, SDL

We have always had some kind of an executive panel where senior managers from content management vendors are questioned on their views of what is happening technology and trend-wise. This is not so much a "face-off" as it is an interactive discussion aimed at providing the audience a chance to hear the different world views of competing suppliers. Understanding the visions behind the marketing, product development, and partnership activity of vendors is at least as important as comparing a feature list and watching demos. Of course, you'll want to see the demos of these and all the other vendors at Gilbane Boston as well.

WCM-3: Web Content "Management State of the Industry"
Thursday December 4th 11:00am, Westin Copley, Boston

This distinguished panel of technology and market experts will discuss their perspectives on the three or four most important concerns of business managers and IT professionals in planning for and executing WCM initiatives over the next year. The panelists are chosen based on their depth of knowledge within WCM and their ability to identify, analyze, and articulate what the current key concerns are for WCM customers. This interactive discussion will help attendees to identify and address potential liabilities in their own WCM strategies as well as to understand what leading practitioners and technology suppliers envision in their own project/product roadmaps.

Moderator: Tony White, Lead Analyst, WCM, Gilbane Group
Speakers:
* Erik Aeyelts Averink, President, SDL Tridion
* John Girard, CEO, Clickability
* Ben Kiker, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Interwoven
* John Newton, CTO & Chairman, Alfresco
* Dmitri Tcherevik, CTO, Fatwire

We have always had pretty good international participation at our conferences, and with a month until Gilbane Boston, it is clear this year will be no different. so far we have attendees from 20 countries outside the U.S., which is pretty typical for us. But what is striking is the 15 17 18 international exhibitors that will be at the show, which is about 50% more than usual. Some of it is due to the growth of our coverage of multilingual content applications, but that only accounts for part of the increase. You can see most of the exhibitors at http://gilbaneboston.com/exhibitors_sponsors.html.

BTW, the "early-bird" discount is available through November 4th 7th at:
http://gilbaneboston.com/registration_information.html.

By David Lipsey, Managing Director, Entertainment & Media, FTI

Can anyone deliver customized content to its customers - in print, on the Web in rich applications, in social networking or to wireless media? To make matters more challenging, what if your customers are two-to-five year olds? Well, Sesame Workshop recently had to address this test to keep its brand relevant to precocious preschoolers. In fact, this non-profit organization behind Sesame Street took the bold view that multi-channel publishing is the future of the Workshop, and recognized that online will become its primary channel of distribution down the line. At the upcoming Gilbane Boston Conference (link to information on session), I will moderate a panel of multi-channel publishing experts, including the VP charged with Sesame Workshop's internet initiative. We will provide you with the latest in content delivery, opportunities to serve more users and more applications, and insights to show that yes, almost anyone can do it. Please join me, Joe Bachana from DPCI (an industry leader in his own right) and the ever-innovative O'Reilly Press for a didactic and enlightening discussion that will get you mulling over ideas for enhancing your brand experience for customers.

We've been especially focused on enterprise search this year. In addition to Lynda's blog and our normal conference coverage, we have released two extensive reports, one authored by Lynda and one by Stephen Arnold, and Udi Manber VP Engineering, Search, Google, keynoted our San Francisco conference. We are continuing this focus at our upcoming Boston conference where Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research, will provide the opening keynote.

Prabhakar's talk is titled "The Future of Search". The reason I added "enterprise" to the title of the post, is that Prabhakar's talk will be of special interest to enterprises because of its emphasis on complex data in databases and marked-up content repositories. Prabhakar's background includes stints CTO at Verity and IBM so enterprise (or, if you prefer "behind-the-firewall", or "intranet") search requirements are not new to him.

Here is the description from the conference site:

Web content continues to grow, change, diversify, and fragment. Meanwhile, users are performing increasingly sophisticated and open-ended tasks online, connecting broadly to content and services across the Web. The simple search result page of blue text links needs to evolve to address these complex tasks, and this evolution includes a more formal understanding of user's intent, and a deeper model of how particular pieces of Web content can help. Structured databases power a significant fraction of Web pages, and microformats and other forms of markup have been proposed as mechanisms to expose this structure. But uptake of these mechanisms remains limited, as content owners await the killer application for this technology. That application is search. If search engines can make deep use of structured information about content, provided through open standards, then search engines and site owners can together bring consumers a far richer experience. We are entering a period of massive change to enable search engines to handle more complex content. Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research, will address the future of search: how search engines are becoming more sophisticated, what the breakthrough point will be for semantics on the Web and what this means for developers and publishers.

Join us on December 3rd at 8:30am at the Boston Westin Copley. Register.

The Content Management Professionals Association (CM Pros) will once again be holding their annual Fall Summit in conjunction with Gilbane Boston in December. There are details over on our Events blog which I won't duplicate here, or even better, go right to the source at http://summit.cmprofessionals.org/. If you are a member we hope to see you, and if you are not you can find out about joining on the CM Pros site at http://cmprofessionals.org/