The deadline for submitting proposals for Gilbane Boston, November 27 – 29, 2007 is May 15, 2007. Instruction for proposals are at: https://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html We will still accept proposals after tomorrow, but chances of acceptance start to diminish quickly as we start designing the program in the next couple of weeks. Remember that we always receive many more excellent proposals than we can fit into our program. Please do not be discouraged if you are not selected. We do multiple events, and may be able to fit your presentation into another conference.
Category: Gilbane events (Page 35 of 44)
These posts are about the Gilbane conferences. To see the actual programs see https://gilbane.com/Conferences/. Information about our earlier Documation conferences see https://gilbane.com/entity/documation-conference/.
When I was much younger, I lived in Upstate NY and was vexed by a certain Gannet Newspaper whose news wasn’t particularly current. I always said that their motto should be “the news in retrospect”.
Now I do some writing in the form of this blog and am embarrassed to admit that my report on the recent Gilbane Conference in SanFrancisco would be covered by the same motto. Age makes us humbler with every passing year.
I was very pleased with the quality of presentations in this year’s Publishing Track. In his recent post, Thad McIlroy was much too modest in his depiction of his impressive Future of Publishing Website. The result of almost 10 years of hard work, the site is a fascinating compendium of past and current views of the future of publishing. It is impressive in its scope, organization, and innate wisdom. We were honored to have it released to the public at our conference.
Thad did his usual outstanding job in leading a panel that gave a crisp and concise view of what is possible today in the world of publishing automation. As publishers, Thomson and O’Reilly distinguished themselves with the processes they are using today and products that resulted from those processes. Their willingness to completely rethink their strategies and re-engineer their processes should prove an inspiration to other publishers.
As you can see from my previous post on We are Smarter than Me, I am very interested in activities at the intersection of communities and publishing entities. Our Panel with representatives of San Diego Union Tribune, MERLOT, and Leverage Software gave vivid examples and insights as to how communities can develop valuable new information or enhance traditional information products. Their talks further fueled my curiosity and thinking on this topic.
Bill Rosenblatt led a great Panel of representatives from Adobe, Mark Logic, Marcinko Enterprises, and Quark through an excellent discussion of how today’s technology can enable publishers to design and implement processes that support true cross media publishing. And then Bill shared the lessons that were learned in an innovative cross-media strategy project that he did with Consumer’s Union. He was joined by Randy Marcinko who cited several clear examples of how the proper processes support cross media publishing and By Chip Pettibone Safari U’s Vice President of Product Development who dazzled the audiance with some of Their new products and business models . Their Rough Cuts and Short Cuts product lines are particularly impressive!
Finally Thad’s posting speaks glowingly of the panel for the International Publishing panel. I concur!!
Thanks to all conference panelists and attendees!! Please send me any comments and critiques that would make the next conference more valuable to you.
Of course I had every intention to blog about the highlights of Gilbane San Francisco, but our attention has already moved to our upcoming Washington, and even our Fall Boston conference. Here are some quick notes on what’s new:
- There was a lot of activity at Gilbane San Francisco, but what got the most press was the second part of our opening keynote where we had Google and Microsoft facing off over enterprise search. A little web and blog searching will turn up some of the reaction.
- Join us and CMS Watch in Washington DC June 5-6 for Gilbane Washington. That’s right, a little over 2 weeks away. The instructions for submitting proposals can be found at: https://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html. We will be covering our usual topic areas with a focus on content and enterprise web technologies (including versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc.). If you’ve never been to our Boston conference you can view all the info from the 2006 event at: http://gilbaneboston.com/06/. For this year’s conference see: http://gilbaneboston.com
- We have 2 webinars coming up in the next 2 weeks:
- Webinar: Bill Trippe talks with Minette Norman of Autodesk. Wednesday, April 25, 2:00 pm EST. Registration is open. Sponsored by Idiom.
- Webinar: Bill Trippe and Michelle Huff from Oracle discuss multi-website content management. Wednesday, May 2, 12:00 pm EST. Registration is open. Sponsored by Oracle.
- See our latest case study: Building an Enterprise-Class System for Globalization: Autodesk’s Worldwide Initiative by Senior Analyst Bill Trippe
- See our latest white paper: Strategic eMarketing: Converting Leads into Profits, by Lead Analyst Leonor Ciarlone
- Remember we have 8 blogs in addition to this one (see the links in the left column) all of which have recent content, even the CTO Blog, which was quiet for some time has a new entry from Eric Severson.
- Reminder: All our blogs support multiple types of tagging as well as comments and trackbacks. Subscriptions to all of them are available via FeedBurner which provides additional features. We are adding additional FeedBurner plugins, for example, as of yesterday you can even “Twit” items from our News Blog if you are into Twitter (see http://feeds.feedburner.com/ContentManagementNews). I am not sure how useful this is, but was easy and free to add and I know some of you Twitter.
We hear it time and again in our engagements with enterprise users who are solving business problems with content technologies. What’s the right mix of business and IT when it comes to success? Today, one specific context for this question is the development of an overarching, enterprise-wide web strategy. Global businesses demand multiple websites, both internal and external. The challenge of managing their development, deployment, and maintenance can be overwhelming. Or not, given the right technology and processes for multi-website content management.
Gilbane’s Bill Trippe talks with Michelle Huff, principle product director, Oracle Content Management, about effective multisite management.
Multiple Websites: Driving You Crazy, or Driving Your Business?
Wednesday, May 2, 9:00 am PT
Registration is open. Registrants receive a complimentary advance copy of the new Gilbane white paper, The Multi-Website Challenge in Enterprise Content Management: Balancing Control and Distributed Content Creation.
If you have issues you’d like Bill and Michelle to address in the webinar, please post comments to this entry, and we’ll include them in the discussion. You can also send email to bill@gilbane.com.
It has been a couple of weeks since the announcement that Fast Search & Transfer would acquire Convera’s RetrievalWare, a search technology built on the foundation of Excalibur and widely used in government enterprises.
At a recent Boston KM Forum meeting I asked Hadley Reynolds, VP & Director of the Center for Search Innovation at Fast, to comment on the acquisition. He indicated Fast’s interest in building up a stronger presence in the government sector, a difficulty for a Norwegian-based company. I remember Fast as a company launching in the U.S. with great fanfare in 2002 (http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbreader.asp?ArticleID=17223 ) to support FirstGov.gov, a portal to multi-agency content of the U.S. Government. That site has recently been re-launched as http://www.usa.gov/ using the Vivisimo search portal. There must be a story behind the story, as I hope to learn.
To add to the discussion, last week I moderated a session at the Gilbane San Francisco conference at which Helen Mitchell, Senior Search Strategist for Credo Systems and Workgroup Chairperson for the Convera User Group, spoke. I asked Helen before the program about her reaction to the recent announcement. She had already been in contact with Fast and received assurances that Convera Federal Users would be well supported by Fast and they want to actively participate in conversations with the group through on-line and in-person meetings. Helen was positive about the potential for RetrievalWare users gaining from the best of Fast technology while still being supported with the unique capabilities of Convera’s semantic, faceted search.
Erik Schwartz, Director of Product Management from Convera, was also present; I encouraged him and Helen to leverage the RetrievalWare user community to make sure Fast really understands the unique and diverse needs of search within the enterprise. We are all well aware that in the rush to build up large customer bases with a solid revenue stream of maintenance, vendors are likely to sacrifice unique technologies that are highly valued by customers. A bottom-line round of pragmatic cost cutting usually determines what R&D a vendor will fund, foregoing the long term good will that could accrue if they would belly-up to integrating these unique features into their own platform.
Time will tell how serious Fast is in giving its new base a truly valuable customer experience. I would also note that this acquisition has also been observed by a broader information management industry publication, Information Week. See David Gardner’s article at http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198701793.
Well, I’d have to say it was a very good conference. Attendance was up, San Francisco was sunny and warm, and I thought the sessions were very good.
I had the advantage/disadvantage of being one of the track chairs of the publishing track, which meant that I had to attend all six publishing sessions. I managed to catch the keynotes as well, which were jam-packed. But I’ll leave it to others to discuss the other tracks and sessions.
We tried to expand the publishing track this spring from a focus solely on automated publishing (we brought that topic down to one session). The subject is important, and very relevant to the rest of the Gilbane conference content, but we had the clear intention of making the publishing track much broader in scope than it had been before.
Steve Paxhia very kindly allowed me to lead off with what was really a dual session. I introduced my new web site: www.thefutureofpublishing.com, but also spoke more broadly on the subject. I’ve got a ton of material that I’m slowly loading onto the Web site, and nine years of research behind it.
We then moved to “Publishing Automation: What Can You Do Today?” and had three great speakers tackle the topic. OK, they were all book publishers, but each had a markedly different approach, and I decided, in the end, that listening to three approaches to a similar problem might be more interesting than three approaches to completely different challenges.
The topic “How Will Internet Communities and Collaboration Technologies Change Publishing Best Practices?” was a tough one, and Steve and his speakers handled it very well. This subject is so slippery. Do you need to create a community on your Web site? What is the ideal extent of collaboration? I was left with the clear sense that community and collaboration are essential to nearly all publishing Web sites.
We then featured two sessions on cross-media publishing strategies. Bill Rosenblatt is the expert. It struck me that there are still a lot of unanswered questions around cross-media publishing, but absolutely no question about the necessity and reality of this phenomenon — not only is it essential, but the tools are there today.
Bill Trippe wasn’t available to moderate “Publishing for International Audiences: Top Challenges and Best Practices” but he had selected two great speakers: Stéphane Dayras, technical services manager for Quark in Europe, and Ben Martin, senior analyst at Flatirons Solutions in Colorado. They were the perfect pairing. Stéphane introduced the topic broadly, and offered a true international perspective. Ben is “the scientist,” and showed extensive details of planning for this tough challenge. Most of the audience stayed behind for an extra half-hour.
Where do we go from here? I’d love to hear from attendees with suggestions. I think we still face a challenge effectively blending this publishing content into the broader Gilbane conference. But I think we’ve given it a home.
This was one of my favorite quotes from Sun’s April 10th presentation at Gilbane San Francisco, titled Managing Content Globally: What Works, What Doesn’t. Given by Jed Michnowicz, Engineering Lead, and Youngmin Radochonski, Globalization Program Manager, the presentation opened the LISA Forum on Day 1 of the conference.
Jed and Youngmin nailed it when they defined three key components of a global content platform: content management, translation, and delivery. As they outlined the struggles of legacy challenges in all three areas, a pattern of checklist items for the audience quickly surfaced. Lack of metadata. “Siloed” mindsets, workflow, and content repositories. Static Web server content delivery. Inconsistent messaging. Slow time to market. Cost overruns. As moderator, it is always interesting to scan the faces in the crowd for reactions. During this part of the presentation the response was palpable: “got that, got that, and yes, definitely got that.”
They also nailed it when they moved to the “here’s the good news” part of the presentation. Global awareness throughout the organization. Process alignment and consistency. Separation of content from presentation. Translation memory management and sharing. Integrated content and translation workflows. Automated, Web services-based content distribution. They described what is most definitely a “Level 2+” integration from a technology perspective. At this point, the audience response was equally palpable: “want that, want that, and yes, definitely want that.”
Wrapping up the success story with lessons learned (according to people, process, and technology categories; be still my heart!) Jed and Youngmin also noted that Sun, like most organizations, is still learning. Some of the questions they posed — which we will continue to explore on this blog — included:
- What takes precedence when solving for people, process and technology?
- What is the proper globalization strategy and who defines it?
- Can a single solution work for everyone?
On behalf of The Gilbane Group and LISA, we thank these excellent presenters for a job well done. This presentation will be available here this week; check out one of my other favorite quotes emblazoned on the t-shirt on the last slide.
Join us on April 11, 8:30 am at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco for Gilbane San Francisco 2007
We have expanded our opening keynote to include a special debate between Microsoft and Google on Enterprise Search and Information Access, in addition to our discussion on all content technologies with IBM, Oracle & Adobe.
You still have time to join us for this important and lively debate at the Palace Hotel, April 11. The keynote is open to all attendees, even those only planning to visit the technology showcase. The full keynote runs from 8:30am to 10:15am followed by a coffee break and the opening of the technology showcase, and now includes:
Keynote Panel: Content Technology Industry Update PART 2
Google and Microsoft are competing in many areas on many levels. One area which both are ramping-up quickly is enterprise search. In this part of the opening keynote, we bring the senior product managers face to face to answer our questions about their plans and what this means for enterprise information access and content management strategies.
Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, CEO, Gilbane Group, Inc.
Panelists:
Jared Spataro, Group Product Manager, Enterprise Search, Microsoft
Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Search Appliance, Google
See the complete keynote description.
Gilbane San Francisco 2007
Content management, enterprise search, localization, collaboration, wikis, publishing …
Complete conference information is at http://gilbanesf.com/07/conference_grid.html
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