Update - We have received a phenomenal number of proposals – almost 50% more than last year. We have also had a huge number of requests for extensions, so we have extended the deadline for speaking proposals through next week – until May 28th. Don’t delay though, as our program committee is already pouring over the proposals we have.
Proposal Deadline: May 16th 28th, 2011
The Gilbane conference is all about helping organizations apply content, web and mobile technologies to communicate with their ecosystem of customers, employees, suppliers, partners, and the rest of the world in the most effective and efficient way possible.
This means understanding what technologies can and can't do, what practices in applying them succeed or fail, and how to plan for changes in market and technology evolution. We bring together a diverse audience of technologists, marketers, strategists, business managers and analysts to learn, share, and debate best practices and strategies. Our conference is organized into four tracks so attendees in marketing, technology, a business unit, or an internal function will be able to plan a customized agenda.
You can also learn more by visiting the conference website at http://gilbaneboston.com, where you can also see information from our 2010 conference.
Customers & Engagement track Topics to be covered include: Web content management, content strategies, analytics, web design and UI, social media, digital and cross channel marketing, rich media, global reach, multilingual practices, personalization, information architecture, designing for mobile devices, e-commerce, search engine optimization. Read more
Colleagues & Collaboration track Topics to be covered include: Collaborative authoring, intranets, knowledge management, search, wikis, micro-blogging and blogging, managing social and user-generated content, integrating social software into enterprise applications, SharePoint, portals, social software platforms, enterprise 2.0 strategies. Read more
Content Technologies track Topics to be covered include: Multi-lingual technologies and applications, smartphone, iPad and tablet app development, XML, standards, integration, content migration, search, open source, SaaS, semantic technologies, social software, SharePoint, and relevant consumer technologies. Read more
Cross-channel Publishing track Topics to be covered include: Multi-channel publishing, multi-lingual publishing, mobile app and digital product development and marketing strategies for the iPad, and other tablets and ebook readers, mobile content management, digital rights, digital asset management, DITA, documentation, structured content, and XML. Read more
I hadn't planned this post on trends but ended-up creating a list for a colleague who was helping a client, and I was definitely overdue to post something. These are in no particular order, and there is a lot more to say about each of them. There are other trends of course, but these are especially relevant to our coverage of content technologies and to Outsell/Gilbane clients.
Marketing and IT continue to learn how to work together as marketing assumes a bigger role in control of digital technology for all customer engagement.
Content strategy gets more respect.
Mobile confusion reigns - which platforms, which formats, apps vs. mobile web and which apps make sense, what workflows, etc.
"Extreme multi-channel" publishing reality hits. You thought web plus print was a challenge?
Enterprise applications start including mobile and don't look back.
"Apps" approach to software distribution expands beyond mobile.
The line between pads and notebooks blurs in both user interface and function.
Spending on digital channels continues to grow ahead of curve.
Enterprise social platform growth stagnates, consumer social platforms continue to grow, but with little direct application to enterprise beyond feature or UI ideas.
Business model experimentation accelerates in content businesses.
This summer, Dale Waldt, Mary Laplante, and I have been busy wrapping up our multi-vendor report about “Smart Content in the Enterprise: How Next Generation XML Applications Deliver New Value to Multiple Stakeholders.” We’ll be publishing the report in it’s entirely in a few weeks. We are grateful to our sponsors – IBM, JustSystems, MarkLogic, Mindtouch, Ovitas, Quark, and SDL – for supporting our research and enabling us to make headway on this important trend for the future of content technologies on the web. Here’s the link to access some of the case studies that are part of this report.
XML as a tagging standard for content is almost as old as the web itself. XML applications have long proven their significant value—reducing costs, growing revenue, expediting business processes, mitigating risk, improving customer service, and increasing customer satisfaction. But for all the benefits, managers of successful XML implementations have struggled with attempts to bring XML content and applications out of their documentation departments and into their larger enterprises.
So much XML content value remains untapped. What does it take to break out of the XML application silo? What is the magic formula for an enterprise business case that captures and keeps the attention of senior management? These are the issues we set out to address.
We believe that the solution needs to be based on “smart content.” When we tag content with extensive semantic and/or formatting information, we make it “smart” enough for applications and systems to use the content in interesting, innovative, and often unexpected ways. Organizing, searching, processing, discovery, and presentation are greatly improved, which in turn increases the underlying value of the information that customers access and use.
We started this discussion late last year. We now have the solution-oriented case studies and the additional analysis to reinforce our perspective about the drivers for the digital revolution at hand. We look forward to the continuing conversations with all of you who are seeking to transform the content-related capabilities of your business operations by championing XML applications.
As we start to delve into some of the interim results of our survey of book publishing professionals, there is a great deal of good data to mull over. While the results are preliminary (and we welcome your participation here), some trends are emerging.
One interesting set of data points surround how publishers are viewing XML, how extensively they work with it, and what technologies they are using to support the management of the XML. Among those using XML, it's significant that only about half have invested in some kind of storage mechanism specifically for XML, including both relational databases and dedicated XML repositories such as Mark Logic server.
While that overall number might or might not be so striking, I am struck by what some publishers feel is a barrier to adopting an XML repository, namely, the "Challenge of building XML knowledge, skills, or awareness." This trumped more traditional barriers to technology adoption such as cost and the maturity of the technology and would seem, on balance, to be a solvable problem.
Click on the thumbnail below to see a snapshot of the current answers to the question.
I just published a new white paper, Social Publishing with Drupal, sponsored by Acquia and also available here. We forget that publishing and blogging (including this post) are stove-piped operations. But what would happen if we could intelligently keep track of all these disparate threads, combining the authoritative content from trusted sources with insights from friends and colleagues, organized contextually around the ways we think about things and make decisions? Social publishing is a new lens for delivering business value.
Here's the executive summary for the white paper. Click the link above if you'd like to learn more. What's the future of social publishing? Let's start a debate. /geoff
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Social publishing combines groomed and authoritative content, produced by an organization and emphasizing its core messages, with user-generated content that customers contribute via blogs, wikis, and social media tools. Drupal is an example of a social publishing platform, developed and maintained as an open source project, and delivered at an affordable cost.
Drupal is now deployed in major media companies, high technology firms, universities, magazine publishers, government agencies (including the White House), research groups, and non-profit organizations. Whether it is in a commercial, non-profit, or government setting, organizations rely on Drupal to project their presence over the web and to channel the interactive experiences that foster communities of contributors.
By leveraging Drupal’s capabilities as a social publishing platform, organizations are able to reinforce their branded experiences and deliver relevant content to their customers and stakeholders. By exploiting Drupal as an open source project, developers supporting these organizations can easily enhance and extend Drupal’s capabilities, and introduce innovative modes of interactivity that meet specific business requirements.
Drupal is an attractive investment with substantial business benefits. Organization can keep their license and support costs modest by building on an open source project. Organizations can leverage the collective expertise of Drupal developers to solve immediate publishing problems. By relying on Drupal, organizations can stay abreast of the rapid technology changes when building competitive solutions for the digital age.
Though we are still catching our breath from the Boston conference and the holidays, it is time to get moving on our annual San Francisco conference, which the 3rd week of May this year. The conference site is http://gilbanesf.com, is still mostly populated with 2009 information, but will be updated this week with a new site design and current information. Content from the 2009 event is at http://gilbanesf.com/09/will be moved to a subdirectory and continue to be available.
In the meantime, The description below is taken from the draft site and will give you a good idea of the topics we'll be covering. If you are interested in submitting a speaking proposal, remember that the deadline for submissions is January 18. See http://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html.
Gilbane San Francisco 2010 Web, content, and collaboration technology have reached a new level of maturity. This is true in terms of technology, but more importantly, it is true in terms of what businesses expect to be able to do with these tools. Web and enterprise content management permeate every aspect of an organization. Public facing internet sites are the front door to an organizations' products and services, and where customers, partners and investors engage with the corporate brand and develop perceptions. Internal websites, whether in the form of intranets, blogs, wikis, or portals, provide knowledge workers increasingly efficient ways to collaborate and share knowledge. Customer and internal-facing applications share requirements that call for a number of enterprise content, publishing and infrastructure technologies, such as multi-lingual, social media, search, and integration software.
Gilbane San Francisco is organized into four tracks so that whether you are responsible for marketing, IT, a business unit, or an internal function, you will be able to easily navigate among the conference sessions. If you are responsible for customer-facing business activities start with the Customers & Engagement track, and then add appropriate sessions from the Content Technology & Content Publishing tracks. If your role is focused on internal collaboration, knowledge sharing or support activities, start with the Colleagues & Collaboration track, and supplement it with sessions from the technology & publishing tracks.
Track 1: Customers & Engagement Corporate websites are now the most important public face of an organization, and the best way to grow, and communicate with, a broader customer base. Successful sales and marketing now requires Web sites that can reach a global audience, a mobile audience, and an audience familiar with social media and used to richer media. Websites also need to be findable, accessible, engaging, real-time & responsive, and have accurate and timely information that is synchronized with other channels. This is a tall order, but it is what your customers expect, and what companies are building.
Attendees: For anyone responsible for marketing, business, or technical aspects of public facing websites, including, sales & marketing, digital marketing, brand managers, business units with P&L, Web strategists, IT, Web managers, business managers, digital media, e-commerce managers, content managers and strategists.
Topics: Web content management, analytics, web design and UI, social media, rich media, global reach, multilingual practices, personalization, information architecture, designing for mobile, e-commerce, search engine optimization.
Track 2: Colleagues & Collaboration Well-designed internal websites for collaboration on projects or operational activities, whether in the form of intranets, portals, blogs, or wikis are critical for supporting modern corporate missions. Social software has reignited interest in enhancing employee collaboration and knowledge sharing, and the right use of social software, alone or combined with an intranet or portal, is a competitive requirement. Employees already use it, and expect it, and can be much more productive with it. While some business use-cases are obvious, companies are a long way from having enough experience to know how best to integrate and deploy different types of social software to best support business requirements.
Attendees: For anyone responsible for internal websites, portals, collaboration & knowledge sharing activities, including, knowledge managers, product managers, project managers, IT, and content managers.
Topics: Collaborative authoring, intranets, knowledge management, search, wikis, micro-blogging and blogging, managing social and user-generated content, integrating social software into enterprise applications, SharePoint, portals, social software platforms, enterprise 2.0 strategies.
Track 3: Content Technology There are many different technologies involved in building web and enterprise content applications. Some of them are simple and some complex, some are open source and some are commercial, some are available via license, some as a service, some are ready for prime time, some aren’t, and some might be ready, but are controversial.
Attendees: For those who are either responsible for technology decisions, or those who need to keep up-to-speed with the latest technology for enterprise content applications of all types, including, central IT, departmental IT, strategists, and managers who need to know what's possible and what's coming.
Topics: Multi-lingual technologies and applications, XML, standards, integration, content migration, mobile, search, open source, SaaS, semantic technologies, social software, SharePoint, XBRL, and relevant consumer technologies.
Track 4: Content Publishing Multi-channel publishing has been a goal of many organizations for years, but it is now more important than ever - and not that much easier. In addition to more traditional print and web channels, smartphones, e-book readers, other mobile devices, and even “in-product” displays need to be considered. In addition to more channels, there are more media types to manage. Dynamic publishing is a key business requirement for both single and multi-channel delivery.
Attendees: For those responsible for content creation, management, and multi-channel/multi-lingual publishing, IT and others that need to learn about publishing technology because of new multi-channel demands, including corporate or commercial publishers, content managers, digital asset managers, documentation managers, and information architects.
Topics: Multi-channel publishing, multi-lingual publishing, e-books, tablets, mobile, digital rights, digital asset management, documentation, structured content, XML, dynamic publishing, and publishing business models.
Publishing predictions for 2010 abound. As a digital publishing pioneer and visionary, Ted Treanor has been well positioned ahead of the curve, with a unique vantage point to see what's in store for the industry. At this tipping point, publishing convergence of print and digital has collided with mainstream. Let us know what you think of these predictions.
Let’s see if 13 predictions will be lucky for publishing.
New eReading devices will proliferate. The market is responding like the California gold rush. Not only will there be new companies launching in 2010, but big electronics firms will have their products. CES will be a haven for digital reading, which will astound everyone.
Pricing experimentation will take center stage.
Digital sales channels both retail and distribution will grow rapidly.
The ePub standard (IDPF.org) will strengthen as an international industry standard. ePub will compete with PDF for the top format for commercial content.
The big surprise this year will be the number of large recognized companies that will strategically target the digital publishing eReading and content space. At least one major communications infrastructure company (possibly wireless) will stake a claim through a publishing partnership. Other prime segments will be computer manufacturers and printer manufactures.
Trade associations will scramble to stay relevant in their attempt to lead members through this time of convergence of print and digital.
Content workflow using XML technologies will become standard for single source production to multiple print and digital editions.
Publishers will attempt to build direct relationships with their reader customers…not very successfully in 2010.
Technology and services companies will further enable authors for self-publishing and in their sales goals. At least one big name author will experiment in self-publishing in 2010.
eCatalogs will become a standard tool in selling content to booksellers, librarians, etc..
Digital galleys will gain in popularity.
E-content will be grafted into print in innovative ways.
New ebook data reports and ebook directories will become ‘must-have’ resources. Gilbane Group has a series of three publishing transformation reports planned in 2010.
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