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We hope to see you at our upcoming San Francisco conference. But whether you join us or not, you can contribute to the keynote discussion by including questions in a comment on this blog entry. Or you can visit the panelists blogs and make suggestions to them directly. Below is the session description with links to the panel member's bios and blogs or websites.

UPDATE: You can also now vote a list of questions we have put together. Voting also gives you a chance for a free conference pass to this or a future conference.

The opening keynote panel is open to both tradeshow and conference attendees.

Keynote Panel: New Technologies That Will Influence Your Content Management Strategies
The pace of information technology development continues to increase as organizations develop experience in implementing content applications, and as software vendors vie to incorporate their customer's feedback into product technologies ahead of the competition. As most enterprise applications become more content-oriented, content technology developments are coming from a broader base of suppliers and developers. In fact, most interesting new computing technologies will, or should, influence your short and long term content management strategies. Our opening panel of industry experts will look at both specific technologies and market trends. This will be a lively interactive panel with plenty of debate.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, Editor & Publisher, The Gilbane Report -- Blog
Panelists:
Dan Farber, Vice President, CNET Networks, Editor in Chief, ZDNet -- Between the Lines Blog
Bill Rosenblatt, Editor, DRM Watch
Charlene Li, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research -- Charlene's Blog
Gene Gable, Gene Gable Industries
Tony Byrne, Founder, CMS Watch

Digital Rights Management (DRM) gets a lot of bad press about its use and misuse, much of it well-deserved. But there is a less controversial use of DRM technology for corporate applications. "Enterprise DRM" complements content management, firewalls, and other technologies in helping to ensure that sensitive information such as confidential documents, email, and application data do not fall into the wrong hands or get used in ways it shouldn't. Much corporate content needs to be managed according to certain rules (having nothing to do with copyright) that are outside the scope of workflow processes, and organizations are paying attention.

Our upcoming Conference on Enterprise DRM at Gilbane San Francisco is the first event devoted exclusively to DRM for corporate applications. The conference, chaired by Bill Rosenblatt of DRM Watch, will be a unique opportunity to explore DRM technologies and how they apply to a wide variety of business environments and technology architectures; several vendors will be on hand to demo their solutions. The program will include several case studies of Enterprise DRM deployments in such applications as financial services, human resources, high-tech manufacturing, and distance learning. The program will also feature leading analysts, including Rosenblatt, Jarad Carleton of Frost & Sullivan, and Trent Henry of Burton Group who will present a framework for analyzing Enterprise DRM solutions.

Executives from Enterprise DRM vendors, including Adobe, Cloakware, EMC/Authentica, Essential Security Software, Fasoo.com, Intelligent Wave, Liquid Machines, SealedMedia, and WorkShare will offer insights into technology and the market. The conference will feature panel discussions on technology issues such as Enterprise DRM for mobile devices, secure inter-enterprise collaboration, and integration of Enterprise DRM with content management.

DRM Watch and Gilbane readers can get a special $100 discount off the eDRM conference price of $495 by registering online with discount code "drmwatch".

CM Pros has announced the final program for their Spring Summit, which is co-located with our Spring conference in San Francisco this month. Attending both events will really get you up-to-date on what others are doing with content management technology these days. There is lots of great content including keynotes from Bill Trippe, Ann Rockley, and James Robertson. From the CM Pros site:

"As awareness of the value of the customer experience increases, so too does the recognition of content -- and content management. With our theme of "Content Management and the Customer Experience" the Summit, which spans two half-days, will address the importance of effective content management in the customer experience context. View additional program detail, including presentation abstracts."

Some of you may have seen the press release from us yesterday announcing our new consulting practice focused on the needs of commercial and corporate publishers. Of course this is not a new area for us - Bill Trippe especially, has long been very active in the publishing space - but rather a dramatic expansion of our activities in an area we know well. It is great to be working with Steve Paxhia again, who will be running this practice. It will also be great to be working more regularly with Gene Gable, Thad McIlroy, Bill Rosenblatt, and Dale Waldt. Here is a description of the practice. We've already launched the practice, but most of our team and our partners will also be at Gilbane San Francisco, where we have a lot of content relevant to publishers including (but not limited to!) the new Automated Publishing track.

We've posted our results in time for the conference session on Blogs, Wikis, and RSS as Enterprise Content Applications tomorrow morning. Keep in mind this is an informal survey and only has 43 responses so far. We will keep the survey going and update the results.

In the course of two days of sessions here at the Gilbane Conference it is clear that, when it comes to compliance, we've overloaded the word "architecture." We have had a fair amount of talk in some of the conference sessions about "compliance architectures." We have also seen different technology architectures used to support compliance systems.

It is easy to understand why at least some of the people in the audience could get all of this confused.  Sometimes it seems that even the speakers have the two "architectures" confused and wrapped around each other.  The bad result that comes from this goes beyond a few confusing conversations.  If there is enough confusion, the consequence is a misdirected approach to addressing compliance issues in individual organizations.

So... I'll take a crack at getting the terms and ideas unwound from each other.  Think of these as "first cut" definitions--aimed at helping people who are just now coming to terms with compliance lingo to understand what is going on.  If you can help out here--improving the definitions--please add some comments.

This morning I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion at the Gilbane Conference that included Carole Stern Switzer of the Open Compliance and Ethics Group, Lynn Brewer of The Integrity Institute, and Michael Evans, Ernst and Young partner responsible for developing the compliance architecture within Ernst and Young.  One objective of the discussion was to provide the IT people and project and product management people, who make up a substantial part of the audience at Gilbane Conference sessions, with some of the conceptual tools they need to help create more effective compliance and risk management programs within their companies.

One of the questions raised from the audience toward the end of the discussion asked about the "enablers" of an effective compliance program.  Lynn Brewer's answer was interesting.  Her observation has been that companies that are making really effective use of compliance, rather than just treating it as a checkmark, are typically ahead of the curve in terms of investing in and integrating IT systems into the compliance effort.  Both Lynn and Carole Switzer argued that one of the key "enablers" is the early and active engagement of people doing hands-on work on the IT side of an organization.

John Yunker is speaking on globalization, as part of the session, Content Management Globalization. John's a great speaker, and has a very useful blog, Web Globalization News.

Eric Silberstein is the founder of Idiom and an expert on DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. Eric and I have done a couple of webinars recently on DITA and globalization, and his presentation today is a more comprehensive version of the one he has given in the Webinars. Eric is also an excellent speaker, and has a lot of credibility on this topic. Click here for the Idiom-sponsored white paper on DITA, and click here for Robin Cover's resource page on DITA.

I am sitting in on the session, A Look at Some Management & Technical Challenges, which is moderated by Seth Gottlieb of Optaros. The speakers are Ann Rockley, Jan Johnston-Tyler, Hardware Writing Manager at Juniper Networks, and Scott Handley, Master Technologist at Hewlett-Packard.

I am liveblogging the Keynote Debate between Microsoft and Sun on what is the right strategy for information interchange. The panelists are Tim Bray, Director, Web Technologies, Sun Microsystems, and Jean Paoli, Senior Director, XML Architecture, Microsoft. Jon Udell is moderating.