Recently in Gilbane Washington 06 Category

Just kidding!

But it was fascinating how much interest there was in blog, wiki and RSS technology at our conference in Washington last week. Just as in the private sector, there is both more use of these technologies than most people realize, and strong interest once people hear about what other organizations are doing with them. See conference chair Tony Byrne's comments on this in his article for Intelligent Enterprise magazine about the conference.

XML, and search were two other areas of intense interest.

This was a very gratifying event: the conference attendees were 90% government, and they were deeply engaged in the use of content technologies.

Listen to Lisa Welchman's interview with Frank Gilbane and Tony Byrne about the upcoming Gilbane Government content management technology conference in this podcast.

We have added a new session to our Washington DC conference the week after next. David Almacy, Internet and E-Communications Director at The White House will provide a brief overview of the White House web site and discuss how technology is being used to assist in communicating the President's message to a growing online audience.

Also, EMC is now going to host a reception at the conference (which is at the Reagan Building) on June 14th, 4:30 - 6:00pm. More info.

Our friends over at CMS Watch have released an updated version of their Enterprise Search Report. The report suggests a healthy enterprise market and covers 28 vendors. There is a free excerpt available. A few of the findings (taken from the press release) are:

- IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft continue to struggle to rationalize multiple search technologies and strategies. Oracle's "Secure Enterprise Search 10g" product may be the most straightforward offering of the three, but it has not yet seen extensive customer testing.

- Smaller search vendors continue to exploit Microsoft's inability to develop effective search solutions atop SharePoint. Mondosoft, Coveo, dtSearch, and others are likely to continue offering value-added capabilities after the release of Microsoft's new search services in SharePoint 2007.

- Google's search appliance has disrupted the market, but customer testing still often finds the appliance lacking in "tune-ability" and integration capabilities.

- Faceted or "guided" navigation capabilities originally associated with enterprise search vendor Endeca have gone from product differentiator to widespread feature. Customers can obtain faceted navigation capabilities from several low-cost search vendors. Now, the key differentiator is the extent to which a search system can successfully autogenerate a useful set of metadata "facets" with minimal customer intervention.

Steve Arnold, the main author of the report, will be leading a couple of sessions on Enterprise Search at our upcoming conference with CMS Watch in Washington DC June 13 -15. Join us there and get more details from Steve.

Well of course there are lots of obvious reasons it matters. But what is under-appreciated by many of us in the private sector is how often the government leads the way in developing, fostering and exploiting technology. This is especially true with information technology. The reason is simple: they have a bigger information management problem than anyone else combined with more resources than anyone else. For example, the US (as well as other governments) were building sophisticated markup-based content management, and electronic publishing applications a decade before the Web and browsers existed. While many of those SGML and electronic technical manual applications may seem primitive today, they were very forward-thinking and advanced then, and provided valuable lessons for today's HTML and XML applications. Also, it is arguable that the entire (non-Google) search technology industry has been kept on life support for the last 20 years because of government investment.

So paying attention to government information technology initiatives is something all IT strategists should be doing. For our June 13-15 conference on government technologies in Washington, Conference Chair Tony Byrne is gathering a broad range of government speakers and experts who have, and are, building powerful content applications. It is a great place to get up-to-speed.

Speakers include:
GAO, FAA, NASA, FirstGov, Navy, Forest Service, EPA, OMB, World Bank,
PostNewsweek Tech Media, NPR, Government Computer News, White House,
GPO, International Trade Commission, Department of Energy, Social
Security Administration, DOT, and many more.

Topics include:
Content management, enterprise search, XML, business cases, content
modeling, open source CMS, best practices, records management, content
security, publishing, text mining, and new technologies being used for
government applications including blogs, wikis, RSS and Podcasting.

The full program is at: http://lighthouseseminars.com/washingtondc/ConferenceGrid.html

The "early bird" discount for our conference in Washington DC, June 13-15 has been extended until May 19th. See the conference program, tutorial descriptions, and registration info.

With San Francisco's conference behind us (another post on that in a bit) we are focused on our newest event coming up in Washington DC, June 13-15. Our DC conference is similar to our other conferences but focused on government application of content technology. Another difference is that we are working with our colleagues over at CMS Watch, whose founder Tony Byrne is chairing the conference. Tony, in turn, has enlisted the help of a program advisory committee made up of government IT and consulting experts. The preliminary conference program is available and registration is open (and yes, there is a government rate).

As Tony over at CMS Watch says, he has been nagging us for a long time to do a conference in Washington DC focused on content technologies for federal government applications. Tony got his wish but only by agreeing to help! Our new conference will be at the Reagan Building, June 13 -15, 2006, and is being produced in conjunction with CMS Watch with Tony as the conference chair. We've done a fair bit of work for the government over the years and are looking forward to doing more in DC, and to working with Tony on the event. There is a call for papers, and the deadline for submissions is February 28, 2006.