F: Making the Business Case for Content Globalization
Instructor: Andrew Draheim, Principal, Kidd & Draheim

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

Please see the conference description and topics below, and then follow the instructions and guidelines for submitting proposals at: http://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html. Send any questions to speaking@gilbane.com.

The lines between many content technologies continues to blur, as they do for example, between Web publishing and social media. Web content management is not just about web pages in repositories, but is part of an integrated platform for presenting and interacting with customers, partners, employees, and other enterprise applications.

Social media outlets with varying characteristics are now channels that need to be included in content strategies. This does not mean you "manage" the content in the same way, or even at all in some cases, but it does mean you need to consider and understand the content and its flow, whether it is used as a new way to informally communicate, for project collaboration, or for engaging customers. Also the variety of tools you might use say, for improving project collaboration, managing regulated content, building an employee knowledge center, or multi-channel publishing, is quite diverse.

Given this evolution of technologies and products, squeezing topics into arbitrarily defined technology categories becomes, well, a bit arbitrary. So, at Gilbane San Francisco this year we are focusing on four broad areas of enterprise use of Web and content technologies. We'll still be covering all of the technologies we traditionally cover, but are organizing them in a way that will make it easier for you to pick a customized conference track that meets your specific business objectives. We'll also provide more guidance on specific business applications. For example, if you are interested in adding multi-lingual capability to your product support infrastructure, we'll identify each conference session that would be appropriate to that task.

The four tracks are:

• Web Business & Engagement
• Managing Collaboration & Social Media: Internal & External
• Enterprise Content: Searching, Integrating & Publishing
• Content Infrastructures

In addition to covering "best practices", technology coverage within these four tracks includes:

• Web Content Management (WCM)
• Authoring
• Enterprise & Site Search, Text Analytics
• Semantic Technologies
• Social Media & Networking
• Multilingual Technologies
• Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
• Publishing
• XML

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.

Many of the efforts are nascent, but this project on Flickr gives you a nice idea idea of the potential for this kind of effort.

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!

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