For more details about the keynotes and conference sessions visit http://gilbanesf.com

Main Conference Schedule

Post-conference Workshops

Technology Showcase

Conference Speakers

The 2008 CM Pros US Spring summit will take place on June 17, the day before the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco.

The new page will be the place to find a listing of our most current reports and studies. You can also find information there about Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn't Work, by Stephen Arnold, which we released in April (and which is not free - but a great deal!).

We have 5 more reports in the works to be published in the next couple of months, and realized we needed a home for this new series of publications. While you can find most anything on our site with our Google custom search, we have reports going back to 1993, as well as many other types of publications, and thought a new home for current reports would make for a friendlier site.

Some of you know that I remain skeptical of the new world "Semantic Web" vision, but I do think semantic technologies are important and have a lot to offer, and Colin will help you see why. Check out his first post and let him know what you think about semantic technologies and what you would like to know about.

Join me on April 9th to discuss the value of translation-oriented authoring with technology provider across Systems, language services provider Argo Translation, Inc., globalization consultant Richard Sikes, and QuadGraphics, a customer reaping the benefits of authoring assistance technology in a FrameMaker environment.

The debate about whether "enterprise fill-in-your-favorite-software-application" makes any sense at all is not new. The terms "Enterprise Document Management" (EDM) and "Enterprise Resource Planning" (ERP) were first used in the 80s, and, at least in the case of EDM, were just as controversial. We have Documentum to thank for both EDM and ECM. Documentum's original mission was to be the Oracle of documents, so EDM probably seemed like an appropriate term to use. Quickly however, the term was appropriated by marketing pros from many vendors, as well as analysts looking for a new category of reports and research to sell, and conference organizers keeping current with the latest buzzwords (I don't exclude us from this kind of activity!). It was also naively misused by many enterprise IT (as opposed to "personal IT" I suppose) professionals, and business managers who were excited by such a possibility.

ECM evolved when the competition between the established EDM vendors and the fast growing web content management vendors reached a point where both saw they couldn't avoid each other (for market cap as well as user requirement reasons). Soon, any vendor with a product to manage any kind of information that existed outside of (or even sometimes even in) a relational database, was an "ECM" vendor. This was what led AIIM to adopt and try to define and lay claim to the term - it would cover all of the records management and scanner vendors who were their existing constituents, and allow them to appeal to the newer web content management vendors and practitioners as well.

We used to cover the question "Is there any such thing as ECM?" in our analyst panels at our conferences, and usually there would be some disagreement among the analysts participating, but our mainly enterprise IT audience largely became savvy enough to realize it was a non-issue.

Why is it a non-issue?
Mainly because the term has almost no useful meaning. Nobody puts all their enterprise content in a single ECM repository. It doesn't even make sense to use the same vendors' products across all departments even in small organizations. - that is why there is such a large variety of vendors with wildly different functionality at ECM events such as AIIM. The most that you can assume when you hear "ECM vendor" is that they probably support more than one type of content management application, and that they might scale to some degree.

There are many who think it not unreasonable to have a single "enterprise search" application for all enterprise content. If you are new to search technology this is understandable, since you may think simple word or phrase search should be able to work across repositories. But, of course, it is not at all that simple, and if you want to know why see Stephen's blog or Lynda's blog, among others. Both Steve and Lynda are uncomfortable with "enterprise search". Steve prefers the term "behind the firewall search". Lynda sticks with the term but with a slightly different definition, although I don't think they disagree at all on how the term is misused and misinterpreted.

Why use "Enterprise ... Whatever" terms at all?
There is only one reason, and that is that buyers and users of technology use these terms as a shortcut, sometime naively, but also sometimes with full understanding. There is just no getting around the barrier of actual language use. Clearly, using the shortcut is only the first step in communicating - more dialog is required for meaningful understanding.

The main conference site is http://gilbanesf.com. Here are the most popular links:

• Conference schedule
• Conference session descriptions
• Workshop descriptions
• Early Sponsors
• Registration

Steve has also set-up a page describing the report at: http://www.arnoldit.com/beyond-search/about-beyond-search.html, and has a blog where he is providing some supplementary material. Also keep an eye on Lynda's blog where she might have some comments while she is doing some editing.

Gilbane Group is conducting a survey of companies that are investigating, adopting, and using rights management solutions for high-value enterprise content (contracts, HR policies, product strategies, regulatory compliance certifications, and so on). The results will be included in our upcoming study on Enterprise Rights Management: Business Imperatives and Implementation Readiness.

We are seeking input from IT, content management, and IT security professionals across multiple industries (excluding consumer media companies, which are outside the scope of this study). Some familiarity with enterprise rights management (ERM) or information rights management (IRM) is necessary (i.e., respondents need to have at least heard of the term).

The survey is online and takes about fifteen minutes to complete. In exchange for participation, qualified respondents will receive the aggregated survey results and the executive summary of the analysis. Respondents who fill out the survey in full and provide a valid email business address are also entered into a random drawing for a free one-hour phone consultation with the Gilbane ERM analyst team. Take the survey now. Contact us if you have any questions about the research or qualifications to take the survey.

The acquisition raises all kinds of questions, of course. Idiom is one of the companies with big potential to bring innovation to the language services industry, which has been ripe for change for some time now. More resources to execute could mean more value for customers sooner. Will the Idiom technology (and SaaS offer) reach its full potential as an agent of change under SDL? What about the impact on buyer choice -- how will the acquisition affect companies coming into the market? Stay tuned for analysis of these and other key questions coming out of today's news.

Steve's report is a look at what is coming next, and is largely, but not only, based on an analysis of what Google is doing, what they are planning on doing, and the emerging ecosystem they are creating. This is fascinating stuff. Steve has recently launched a must-read blog, Beyond Search, where you can get a peek at some of what will be in our report. For example, see his thoughts on enterprise search terminology.

Both reports will be important tools for enterprise IT strategists and executives. We'll keep you posted on their progress.

• Joerg Dennis Krueger, Managing Director and vendor-independent consultant and analyst with Cara Europe Ltd in Germany, is committed to expanding the CM Pros community in Europe.


• Tony Pietrocola, President and Co-founder of Tenth Floor Interactive has more than 10 years in the content management industry and will work to market and expand the recognition of CM Pros.


• Paul Trotter, Founder and CEO, Author-it, New Zealand has worked with content management for the past 12 years and plans to use his practical "make it work" experience to champion CM Pros member benefits.


• Andrew Wilcox, president and founder of Everage Consulting, Canada, has served as Technology Manager for CM Pros and plans to follow through with the technology initiative currently in process.


• Barry Schaeffer, president of X.Systems.Inc, focuses on handling the organizational impacts of information technology changes and is dedicated to developing a body of CM Pros knowledge.

By the way, I believe the Executive Director position is still open.

You'll note the "New/Old" in this post's title. Many readers will know that this is because we have always been involved in XML consulting, and before it existed were involved in SGML consulting, which of course is where XML came from. In fact, though we have changed the name of the company a couple of times, our original company was formed in 1986 to advice to organizations like the DoD, Department of Commerce, Lockheed, Fidelity, American Airlines, and many more, on the use of descriptive markup languages and meta-languages like SGML. In fact I first met Bill in 1987 when he was at Mitre investigating SGML. You can still read a lot of our monthly reports from the 90's that cover markup technologies, although Tim Bray, who edited the Gilbane Report in the late 90s and is one of the authors of the XML standard didn't write much about it then since XML was still in "stealth" mode. It was also important then to stay neutral about standards, which obviously would have been tough for Tim at the time.

So if we've been doing this all along, what's new? In short, critical mass, information infrastructure, and demand. The sheer volume of XML being created is reaching a level that demands enterprise strategic attention. XML is already part of many organizations information infrastructure whether they know it or not. And while many of our consulting clients are focused on specific applications, there are also many who are looking at the big picture and really want to understand what information encoded in XML can do strategically for their business. More from today's press release:

Gilbane’s XML Technologies and Content Strategies Practice is designed for IT and business managers who need to gain control of critical content, increase collaboration across enterprise applications, improve efficiencies through faster and more flexible information distribution between business partners and customers, and implement new business models that can keep pace with today's internet-speed competitive requirements. The amount of XML content being generated today is staggering, as large infrastructure providers like Microsoft, IBM, Google, Oracle, and others offer tools and technologies that generate and manage XML information, While many organizations are taking advantage of XML within departmental applications, most companies are not even close to taking advantage of the XML information being created and utilized by popular applications including office software and database repositories. Significantly, many executives are unaware of the XML content and data that are untapped assets within their organizations.