For Immediate Release:

Gilbane Boston Keynote Panel to Debate the Future of Content Management
10/10/06

Largest Collection of Industry Analysts, Researchers, and Practitioners Gather to Provide Unique Balanced Market Perspective 

Contact:
Jeffrey V. Arcuri
508-759-8180
jeff@lighthouseseminars.com

Boston MA, October 10, 2006. The Gilbane Group and Lighthouse Seminars today announced the opening keynote panel for the 3rd Annual Gilbane Boston Conference will take place November 28th – 30th, 8:30am, at The Westin Copley Place in Boston, Massachusetts. The dynamic keynote panel “The Future of Content Management Technologies & Solutions” will be moderated by Frank Gilbane, CEO, Gilbane Group, Inc. panelists include: Jared Spataro, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Office Servers, Information Worker PMG, Microsoft; David Nelson-Gal, Senior Vice President, Engineering, Interwoven; Detlef Kamps, President, RedDot Solutions; Jim Howard, CEO, CrownPeak, and John Newton, Co-founder & CTO, Alfresco.

The Gilbane Conference opens each of its events with a panel of content technology and market experts that is completely interactive (i.e., no presentations). The experts include industry analysts, consultants, enterprise IT and business senior managers, and technologists. This year’s Boston conference has a cross section of different categories of content technology vendors, including a large ECM vendor, a mid-tier second generation vendor, a hosted CM vendor, an open source ECM vendor, and an infrastructure supplier. Each of these types of vendor could provide some, or all, of an organization’s content and information management needs, but how do you decide which? Which of these approaches point towards the future and which will be legacy approaches? Do they complement each other or compete? What do they have in common? What do each of these technology experts think the future of content management and content-oriented applications will look like? This will prove to be a lively and educational debate!

This annual event brings together thought leaders and practitioners to provide attendees with actionable advice, techniques, best practices, and case studies to help successfully implement content technologies critical to their businesses. The topics to be covered in-depth in the conference program will include:

• Web Content Management (WCM)
• Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
• Collaboration, Enterprise Wikis & Blogs
• Enterprise Search & Information Access Applications
• Enterprise Digital Rights Management (eDRM)
• Automated Publishing

The event includes:

• 34 sessions and panel discussions
• 4 pre-conference tutorials
• Technology demonstration area with more than 50 of the leading vendors
• Special events
• Co-located with the Content Management Professionals Association (CM Pros) Fall Summit

“We have once again built a program anchored by a cross-section of industry thought leaders that provides independent analysis and balanced market perspectives that can’t be found at any other event,” said Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair. “We are focused on hosting an educational conference that includes everything IT strategists and project teams need to know in a hype-free environment that offers insights into existing and upcoming technologies necessary to implement content-oriented applications.”

Learn more:
http://gilbaneboston.com/06/

About Gilbane Group Inc.
The Gilbane Report serves the content technology community with publications, conferences and consulting services. The Gilbane Report also administers the Content Technology Works program disseminating best practices with partners Software AG (TECdax:SOW), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW), Artesia Digital Media, a Division of Open Text, Astoria Software, ClearStory Systems (OTCBB:INSS), Context Media (Oracle, NASDAQ: ORCL), Convera (NASDAQ:CNVR), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Idiom, Mark Logic, omtool (NASDAQ:OMTL), Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX), SDL International (London Stock Exchange:SDL), Vasont Systems, Vignette (NASDAQ:VGN), and WebSideStory (NASDAQ:WSSI). https://gilbane.com

About Lighthouse Seminars
Lighthouse Seminars’ events cover information technologies and “content technologies” in particular. These include content management of all types, digital asset management, document management, web content management, enterprise portals, enterprise search, web and multi-channel publishing, electronic forms, authoring, content and information integration, information architecture, and e-catalogs. http://www.lighthouseseminars.com

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I had planned on introducing Elizabeth Gooding, our newest guest blogger, with her initial post, but Elizabeth caught me off guard and already posted twice last week (here and here)! In any case, Elizabeth has a design and consulting company she founded 18 years ago that has been focused ever since on the document design, processing, and delivery needs of financial services companies. Elizabeth is a hands-on CEO who may know more than anyone about technologies and strategies for financial service industry document-oriented applications. Elizabeth brings a new area of important expertise to our blog. Welcome Elizabeth!
Disclosure: I am on her board, but I would still say nice things about her if I wasn’t!

I’m a firm believer in the value of user groups. I think that they are most valuable when the user community has enough energy to manage them independently from the software publisher. This is rare and getting rarer in the composition software industry.

In the absence of an independent user group, and not to be confused with same, many vendors sponsor User Conferences, which are great opportunities to mingle with other users and see presentations on “real life product implementations” albeit under the watchful eye of the vendor.

A number of vendors have their 2006 user conferences coming up in the Autumn:

Today and tomorrow GMC Software Technology will be hosting its 1st Annual International User Conference in Prague, the Czech Republic. No word yet on plans for another US based user conference. (Prague is gorgeous this time of year – wish I could go!)

Isis Papyrus will hold their Users Conference on October 2 and 3 in Dallas. (I’ll actually be presenting at that event on some of the latest trends in composition tools that are of interest to the print service bureau market. Look me up if you’re there)

On October 16 – 18 in San Diego Document Sciences will hold their annual conference, now dubbed “xCelerate North America 2006.”

Exstream Software will hold their Annual User Conference in Lexington Kentucky from October 22 – 25 and is currently blasting the user community with printed and electronic invitations to attend. I think I could paper the cafeteria with the invitations my firm has received! (Yes, we’re registered – please stop!) They will also be holding a User Group meeting during the event.

If you are aware of any other upcoming user conferences, please post.

If you are currently evaluating composition tools, user conferences are a great way of getting information somewhat independently from the sales rep. If there is an actual user group meeting at the conference, this is a great way of gauging customer satisfaction and vendor responsiveness. I highly recommend attending user conferences when shopping for products.

If you don’t have the opportunity to join a user group or attend a conference, some other good resources are the various product communities on Yahoo Groups as well as the always “infotaining” UK based site run by Mike Gatiss.

In all of these forums please let people know what you REALLY think about the products you use. If you don’t air the problems, the vendors don’t fix them and the next guy gets sold the same problems. Some firms are hesitant to publicly reference any shortcomings in the products they purchase, as if the problems reflected on them instead of the vendor. Every product has room for improvement and every software user can probably learn something new about the products they own.

Connect! Share! Learn! ‘Tis the season.

Well, it is a provocative and interesting way to launch a discussion about the changes in the CM market.
Dan Farber reports from DEMO on new products that some might consider Content Management 2.0, and why, from Koral, System One, Serebrum and MindTouch.

For a veteran’s point of view see John Newton’s post on CM 2.0 over on the Content Technology CTO Blog.

For those of you interested in the conversation about defining more than simple workflow, the WS-BPEL 2.0 Specification public review period started on September 10 and ends November 9. (HTML version)

Microsoft architect John Evdemon is the co-chair of this OASIS committee and has all related links for the specification on his Loosely Coupled Thinking blog. Bruce Silver’s BPMS Watch, Ismael Ghalimi’s IT/Redux, and the BPEL section of ITtoolbox Blogs are good sources for perspective.