Gilbane San Francisco 2010
May 18-20, 2010, Westin Market Street, San Francisco

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 content management permeates every aspect of an organization. Public facing internet sites are the front door to an organization’s products and services, and where customers, partners and investors engage with the corporate brand and develop perceptions. Internal websites, whether in the form of sites, blogs, wikis, or portals, provide knowledge workers increasingly efficient ways to collaborate and share knowledge. Social software bridges internal and external communication and extends reach beyond traditional boundaries.

Gilbane San Francisco is focused on what you should expect from these technologies, and is organized into 4 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.

Conference Program & Workshops

Keynotes (K)
Customers & Engagement (E)
Colleagues & Collaboration (C)
Content Technologies (T)
Content Publishing (P)
Pre-conference Workshops

Keynotes (K)

K1. Opening Keynote

Our opening keynote session sets the stage for the rest of the conference with presentations & discussion of two of our main themes: engaging customers, and collaborating with colleagues.

Prolific blogger and Twitterer Jeremiah Owyang may communicate with more companies on the use of web and social software technologies for connecting with customers than any other individual. Jeremiah has been involved in interactive marketing both as a Web marketer and an analyst at Forrester and now at Altimeter Group. If you want to know how companies are actually using social and web tools to engage with customers, Jeremiah is the go-to guy.

Strategist and Author Dan Rasmus has been studying the knowledge worker workplace as an analyst, consultant, and at Microsoft for decades, and has deep insight into how it has, and will continue, to change. Dan will be talking about two critical areas of collaborating in today’s, and tomorrow’s, workplace: cross-border, cross-culture collaboration practices, and how to design workplace experiences that will buffer people from complex changes that will likely take place in the future.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, President, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Customer Strategy, Altimeter Group (presentation)
Daniel W. Rasmus, Strategist & Author, Listening to the Future (presentation)

K2. Industry Analyst Keynote Debate: Industry Analyst Debate – What’s Real, What’s Hype, and What’s Coming

We invite industry analysts from different firms to speak at all our events to make sure our conference attendees hear differing opinions from a wide variety of expert sources. A second, third, fourth or fifth opinion will ensure you don’t make ill-informed decisions about critical content and information technologies or strategies. This session will be a lively, interactive debate guaranteed to be both informative and fun.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, President, Gilbane Group

Panelists:
Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC
Tony Byrne, Founder, The Real Story Group & CMS Watch
Scott Liewehr, Senior Consultant, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group

 

Customers & Engagement Track (E)

E1. Track Keynote

The Customers & Engagement track kicks off appropriately with a focus on our collective audience: the consumer. The experts on this panel have dedicated their careers to understanding the mindset of users, creating top-notch customer experiences both on and off the web, and engaging customers and prospects alike. The intent of this session is twofold: 1) to open the minds of attendees to the perspectives of the audiences they serve, and 2) to learn, through the course of dialog, the techniques and best practices of creating a world-class customer experience.

Moderator: Scott Liewehr, Senior Consultant, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Donna Rossi, VP Global Customer Experience Management, Western Union
Kumar Vora, Vice President & General Manager, Enterprise, Adobe
Shannon Ryan, CEO, non~linear creations
Michael Fisher, Senior VP Sales & Marketing (Americas), Alterian

E2. Findability – Crafting Your Site to Drive Traffic and Improve Conversions

Whether your site is carrying corporate information, delivering content-based products, or selling goods and services directly online, you have to be able to be found to be successful. The exploding fields of online marketing, search marketing, search engine optimization, and social recommendations are all producing rapid-fire innovations in web site findability and commercial targeting. In this session, the panel of online marketing experts and search specialists present some of the most current ideas about attracting and converting audiences, and suggest practical ways to implement them on your site.

Moderator: Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC

Speakers:
Sam Mefford, Enterprise Search Practice Lead, Avalon Consulting, LLC
“Four Techniques to Increase Meta-Data Quality with Less Staff” (presentation)
Richard Zwicky, President and Founder, Enquisite
Ed Hoffman, VP, Global Business & Corporate Development, SLI Systems

E3. Connecting Users and Content – Panel

In a multigenerational, multicultural, global business environment, customers have never been more diverse, more demanding, or more important. Companies today understand the need to provide targeted, personalized content to customers—internal and external. They realize meeting the content needs of their customers provides an opportunity to create added value for their products and their brands. .But how do you connect your knowledge of the user with decisions about the content you create and deliver? This panel discussion will bring together content managers and professionals who have used information about their customers to make key decisions about content and how to deliver it. Based on their own experience and real life case studies, the panel will discuss:

  • The long-term value of a customer and the role content plays in establishing and maintaining that relationship
  • The link between understanding the user (personas, surveys, task analysis, scenarios, content metrics) and the content strategy and model
  • How to build customer feedback and understanding into your customer lifecycle so that your knowledge of the user is dynamic and on-going
    Tool and technology implementations

Moderator: Joan Lasselle, President, Lasselle-Ramsay, Inc. (panel presentations)

Speakers:
Amy Hills, Manager of Technical Communications, Xilinx
Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Google
Dale Weideman, Solution Consultant & Account Executive, Sametrix

E4. Reaching More Customers – Case Studies in Multilingual, Multisite WCM

The number one requirement for audience engagement is language. We can’t engage our audiences if we don’t communicate in their preferred language. Leading practitioners show how they are addressing the significant challenges associated with managing global content for multiple websites in multiple languages.

Moderator: Mary Laplante, Vice President, Client Services & Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group (panel presentations)

Speakers:
Gary Muddyman, Managing Director/CEO, Oxford Conversis
Sultan Ghahtani, Regional Director, Sitecore
Simon Lande, CEO, Magus

E5. Audience Engagement Frameworks – Case Studies

This session will review case studies from two organizations which have demonstrated the ability to increase sales via personalization and online engagement. The presentations will highlight the business needs and challenges of each organization, describe their approach/solution, and review their results as well as the lessons they learned along the way.

Moderator: Ian Truscott, Senior Analyst, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Gert-Jan Schikker, Marketing Manager New Media, Voetbal International
Michael Fisher, Senior VP Sales & Marketing (Americas), Alterian
Steven Alessi, VP of Advertising Sales & Operations, American Greetings Interactive

E6. Gathering Customer Intelligence – Are Listening to Your Customers?

In order to be persuasive, one must first be perceptive. The perceptive layer, or customer intelligence layer, of a web property is a key component of successful online engagment. This session will explore the use of social analytics to measure customer engagement, brand perception, market reach, social sentiment, etc. It will also review the best practices of how to integrate the volumes of this social data back into search engines and their relevancy ranking systems in order to improve user experience, personalization and ultimately ROI.

Moderator: Irina Guseva, Senior Editor, CMSWire.com

Speakers:
Carl Grimm, Director, Advanced Technologies, New Idea Engineering “Behavior Based Engagement”
Rob Howard, Founder & CTO, Telligent, “Social Analytics: Know Your Customers and Your Brand”

E7. How to Mold the Customer Experience

With all the talk about Customer Intelligence Engines, Audience Engagement Frameworks, perceptive and persuasive content, etc., what can the average organization do to implement such capabilities? This educational session will review many of the techniques that organizations can use to personalize content in a manner which will engage their audiences and improve ROI.

Moderator: Ian Truscott, Senior Analyst, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Melissa Casburn, Director of User Experience, ISITE Design
Randy Woods, Co-Founder & Executive Vice President, non-linear creations

E8. Smarter e-Commerce – Raising the Bar for the User Experience

Businesses who sell online have long had the goal of converting their users from tire-kickers and price-shoppers to loyal brand communities. The most successful brands today are focusing heavily on creating user experiences that are more compelling than their competition, and making the intelligence behind delivering that premium experience a corporate competitive advantage. Join this panel of e-Tail and e-Commerce experts as they discuss the techniques behind successful user interactions, from understanding user intent to offering the most exciting discovery environments.

Moderator: Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC

Speakers:
Ed Hoffman, VP, Global Business and Corporate Development, SLI Systems
“The Language of Your Customers and SEO: Using Long-tail Terms to Improve Findability”
Paul Sondregger, Chief Strategist, Endeca

E9. WCM as the Digital Marketing Hub

The capabilities of Online Marketing platforms and Web Content Management systems are beginning to converge. Similarly, the roles of marketers and content managers are overlapping more and more as marketers begin to take ownership over all web site content. Using real-world case studies, this session will explore the ways in which marketers utilize WCM strategies to manage content both within and beyond the bounds of their web sites – including the use of social media. It will also identify the features and functions that are most important to online marketers, those which aid them in increasing engagement and measuring effectiveness.

Moderator: Scott Liewehr, Senior Consultant, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Robert Rose, Chief Troublemaker, Big Blue Moose
“The I Before E – Even After C – Of Digital Marketing And WCM Convergence”
Ian Truscott, Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group (presentation)

 

Colleagues & Collaboration Track (C)

C1. Open Source Collaboration Software: Benefits and Challenges

Much has been said about how open source collaboration suites can be deployed to support communities in flexible, interactive environments that expedite connections within and across organizations. This session asks what makes open source offerings desirable, are they all that different from commercial platforms, and how do you best use them to channel the flow of information and solve business problems? Several implementers will take us inside their community development processes and also discuss how open source principles contribute to their innovative collaboration solutions.

Moderator: Geoffrey Bock, Senior Analyst, Collaboration & Social Computing, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Dr. Donna Cuomo, Chief Information Architect, MITRE (presentation)
Arje Cahn, CTO, Hippo
Scott Mattoon, Enterprise Architect, Oracle Corporation

C2. How to Blend Social Computing, Content Management, and Collaborative Tools into Productivity Solutions Everyone Loves

As organizations adopt social computing tools and social approaches to business, new opportunities and challenges are emerging in traditional collaboration and content management. How can you manage new types of content such as wikis, blogs and podcasts? How do you enable folksonomies to co-exist alongside taxonomies? How do you enable communities vs. teams? And how can you drive content compliance through usability? In this session we’ll discuss these and related topics using examples from Microsoft, our customers, and our new 2010 products. You’ll come away with thought-provoking ideas and examples of how to blend together modern collaboration solutions that exploit social and content capabilities which users, executives, and compliance officers can all love.

Moderator: Larry Hawes, Lead Analyst, Collaboration & Enterprise Social Software, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Christian Finn, Senior Director, Microsoft (presentation)

C3. Cloud-Based B2B Collaboration Services: Cross-Firewall Groupware

The need to collaborate and share content across firewalls has grown significantly as business becomes more of a networked activity. Knowledge workers are increasingly turning to collaboration and content management tools that are located in the cloud to work with others outside of their organization. This session explores some of the use cases and value propositions associated with cloud-based, content-centric collaboration services.

Moderator: Larry Hawes, Lead Analyst, Collaboration & Enterprise Social Software, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Andy McLoughlin, Co-Founder & VP Business Development, Huddle.net (presentation)
Sri Chilukuri, CEO & Co-Founder, Content Circles (presentation)
Rick Treitman, Entrepreneur in Residence, Adobe Systems & Director of Product Marketing and Business Development, Acrobat.com
Jen Grant, VP Marketing, Box.net

C4. Social Analytics: The Key to ROI in Enterprise Social Software?

One of the largest inhibitors to the adoption of enterprise social software has been the inability of advocates to offer currency-based business cases, either pre- or post-deployment. This session examines how analysis of social software usage data can help to produce credible demonstrations of ROI in enterprise social software.

Moderator: Larry Hawes, Lead Analyst, Collaboration & Enterprise Social Software, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Rob Howard, Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Telligent
J.B. Holston, CEO & President, NewsGator Technologies, Inc. (presentation)
Ben Kiker, Chief Marketing Officer, Jive Software
Timothy Young, Founder & CEO, Socialcast

C5. Real-time Search – Mining the Conversation for Immediate Results

Recent announcements from Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! about access arrangements to data feeds of social content from Twitter, Facebook, and OneRiot is bringing real time information from microblogs and social networks into the results lists of major Web search engines for the first time. The arrival of real time content on the largest search sites represents a significant milestone in the development of Web 2.0 and an important strategic initiative for the web search giants and social sites alike. This session will explore the accelerating convergence of social content and search, and identify how this trend will impact everything from a business’s online marketing strategies to the contents of its employees inboxes.

Moderators: Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC

Speakers:
Catherine H. van Zuylen, VP, Product Marketing, Attensity Group
Gerry Campbell, CEO, Collecta
Bill Lynch, Co-Founder and VP Product Management, Jive Software

C6. Integrating External and Internal Social Efforts to Maximize Business Performance

Some organizations have deployed enterprise social software to address both external and internal use cases, but few have created linkages between the two. This session uses customer case studies to demonstrate the business value created by integrating external and internal social collaboration efforts and to highlight some of the related challenges.

Moderator: Larry Hawes, Lead Analyst, Collaboration & Enterprise Social Software, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Ken Efta, Co-Founder & Principal Consultant, Allyis
David Rosenberg, Vice President & Development Lead of Internet Services, Edelman
Randy Ziegler, Director of the EMC Community Network, EMC

C7. Breaking out of the Silo: Improving Global Content Value Chains by Collaborating Across Departments

Gilbane research shows that lack of collaboration is a major barrier to more effective content globalization practices. Managers and operational champions recognize this, but struggle to break out of departmental silos (such as web operations, technical documentation, sales and marketing, and customer support). This session helps attendees identify a starting point for better collaboration. Topics include where organizations benefit by sharing content and language assets, when to make the leap across silo boundaries, and how to institute effective business processes that span departments. This session is produced in collaboration with Localization World.

Moderator: Mary Laplante, Vice President, Client Services & Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Heather Cunningham, Localization Project Manager, Philips Medical Systems (presentation)
Ben Martin, Director of Business Architecture, Flatirons Solutions (presentation)

 

Content Technologies Track (T)

T1. Learn About SharePoint

The release of SharePoint 2010 is not far off (apparently, May 12th). If you haven’t already looked into it, now is definitely the time to start. This session will provide multiple viewpoints on implementing SharePoint.

Moderator: Rahel Anne Bailie, Content Strategist,
Intentional Design

Speakers:
Tom Sheridan, IT Director, Gas Technology Institute
“Implementing SharePoint: An end-user Perspective” (presentation)
Nicholas Carr, AvePoint
“Best Practices for Architecting, Deploying and Optimizing SharePoint 2010”

T2: Evaluating the SharePoint Ecosystem

Microsoft SharePoint boasts a large and quite diverse “ecosystem” of consultants, integrators, and add-on software vendors. For customers, though, this landscape can be very confusing. Who are the key players? what sort of supplementary tools do you need? What are the pros and cons of going outside Redmond for key services? How does SP 2010 change all this? Tony Byrne from SharePoint Watch (a service of the Real Story Group) will try to answer all your questions.

Speaker:
Tony Byrne, Founder, Real Story Group (formerly CMS Watch)

T3. Content Metrics: Tools for Measuring ROI in Global Content Infrastructures

Is your organization’s multilingual content delivering the business results that you and your colleagues, managers, and executives expect? You’re not alone if you can’t answer that question. Credible, measureable insights into what content is working and what’s not remains the practice of magicians and shamans at most organizations. Fortunately, content metrics can less black art and more science. This session looks at new tools and technologies that enable you to develop the metrics you need to align your content practices with business objectives, measure the impact of multilingual content, and get funding for investment in content globalization infrastructures (people, process, and technology).

Moderator: Mary Laplante, Vice President, Client Services & Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group (session presentations)

Speakers:
Michael Martyn, President, Enthink, Inc.
Robinson Kelly, CEO and Co-founder, Clay Tablet
Swamy Viswanathan, Vice President of Products, Language Weaver (presentation)

T4. SharePoint Search – Evaluating Options and Alternatives

With the upcoming release of the lastest versions of SharePoint and Office, many firms are taking a new look at their search strategies in light of the changing offerings from Microsoft. In this session, leading Sharepoint experts will discuss the new look of search in SharePoint and offer their guidance about how to go about building a search strategy that makes sense in light of the goals of the business, the many search systems installed, and the future directions in the technology.

Moderator: Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC

Speakers:
Miles Kehoe, Senior Strategist & President, New Idea Engineering
Brian Rodriguez, Manager of FAST Technical Solutions (Western N.A.), Microsoft

T5. Building & Managing Content in the Cloud

The Cloud is emerging as a powerful strategy for creating and managing content assets that provides advantages over locally hosted content. Universal access to content provides flexibility for organizations with distributed content creators, processors, and service organizations. Deployment of software and content is greatly simplified. Even investment in client and processing platforms can be significantly reduced by hosting your content and systems in remote, secure, robust environments. This session examines these advantages and strategies for content creators and managers working in the Cloud.

Moderator: Dale Waldt, Senior Consultant, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Jen Grant, VP Marketing, Box.net
“Comparing SaaS & Traditional ECM Systems”
Andrew Thomas, Global Information Management Evangelist, SDL
“The Cloud, The Crowd and Collaboration”

T6. The Future of Open Source Content Management

Deploying open source content management systems requires thoughtful planning and a strategy for success. A new generation of content-enabled application platform is then appearing and will rapidly become the new way to develop content composite applications. This session examines the direction open source content management tools are taking and will aide in planning for future implementations.

Moderator: Dale Waldt, Senior Consultant, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Geoff Bock & Dale Waldt, Gilbane Group
“Gilbane Group Technology Landscape for Content-centric Solutions”
Ian White, The Business Insider
“Scaling Web Applications with NonSQL Databases: The Business Insider Case Study” (presentation)
Emmanuel Garcin, Vice President & General Manager, Jahia North America
“Future of Content Management Platforms (CMP) and WCM Solutions” (presentation)

T7. Understanding Information Strategies – Building the I in Your IT Team

Too many teams that deliver information focus on delivery to the exclusion of their information. They pursue a technology strategy with no corresponding information strategy. Using work the speakers have done at a variety of commercial, nonprofit and educational organizations, they will talk about how you can use an information strategy and analysis to complement the information systems approach your team uses. We will discuss: how an information strategy matches business goals, user needs and information structure, how information structures bring value to both the business and the user, and how to begin creating strategy and structure in your organization. The session also looks at the nature of content and how we may need to change its development, management, and delivery to survive in a “Web 2.0” world, and what that means for forward-thinking information architects and content curators. Everyone believes that information is power, this session will help you start harnessing that power. The session will be especially useful for project teams comprised of IT and information managers.

Moderator: Scott Liewehr, Senior Consultant, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Bob Boiko, Senior Lecturer, University of Washington iSchool
“Building the I in Your IT Team”
Rahel Anne Bailie, Content Strategist, Intentional Design & Kevin Nichols, President, KPN Digital | Interactive
“Content Strategies for Today’s Delivery Requirements” (presentation)

T8. Open Source Tools That are Changing the Content Technology Landscape

Open Source tools are dramatically changing our perceptions of software and how we invest in tools for content creation, management and delivery. Open source tools are created more cheaply by a broad team of developers, but also may require strong support organizations to make them work, so they are never free. This session will examine effective strategies for evaluating and deploying open source content management tools.

Moderator: Dale Waldt, Senior Consultant, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Aldo Bermudez, Sr. Manager, Web Publishing, Cisco Systems
“Open Source Content Management in the Enterprise” (presentation)
Shaun Walker, Founder & Chief Architect, DotNetNuke
“Combining Open Source with ASP.NET 4.0” (presentation)

T9. Semantic Technologies – Foundation for Smarter Online Business

We are seeing the emergence of a new class of both enterprise applications and web-based businesses in which semantic technologies play a core role in delivering value to the user. These new applications are based on analytic intelligence about the nature and context of the information at play in their domain, while at the same time taking the intentions and context of the user into account. In this session, you will hear from leading practitioners about how they are engineering content enhancement, semantic search techniques, and contextualized user interaction designs to deliver smarter products and services to users.

Moderator: Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC

Speakers:
Marc N. Haines, Senior IT Architect, Ictect (presentation)
Nosa Omoigui, Founder & CEO of Nervana, Inc
Brooke Aker, CEO, Expert System USA (presentation)

T10. Building Robust Content Assets

Robust content can drive many processes designed to realize savings in time and costs and enable high quality, accurate information. Building robust content requires an understanding of the business drivers for your content and the systems that are used to create and manage it. Migrating legacy content to a robust environment will entail adding detail and value to the content before it can enable these benefits. This session focuses on the challenges and goals for creating robust content.

Moderator: Dale Waldt, Senior Consultant, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Andrew Striemer & Chad Miller, Robert Half International
“Pain Free Content Migration at Robert Half International”
Deane Barker, Content Management Practice Director, Blend Interactive
“The Mysterious Art of the Content Inventory” (presentation)
Dick Weisinger, Software Technologist, Formtek
“Building a Global View of Your Organizational Data” (presentation)

T11. The Leading Edge of Content Technologies

Content technologies are never static, are always evolving, and can be surprising. Businesses endeavor to attempt the next new strategies to better meet their objectives. This session focuses on some leading edge concepts and approaches to creating, managing, and delivering content that support these new and bold initiatives.

Moderator: Dale Waldt, Senior Consultant, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Cheryl McKinnon, CMO, Nuxeo
“CMIS – What is the Value to Business?” (presentation)

 

Content Publishing Track (P)

P1. Eliminating the Multilingual Multiplier: Addressing the Cost of Producing Formatted Content in Multiple Languages

Gilbane coined the term “multilingual multiplier” to refer to those costs that are solely related to formatting content for delivery to customers in multiple languages. Commonly referred to as “desktop publishing costs,” they are a symptom of language afterthought syndrome – that pattern of treating language requirements as secondary considerations within content strategies and solutions. Learn how to eliminate the multiplier effect with holistic approaches to content, translation, and publishing systems and processes.

Moderator: Mary Laplante, Vice President, Client Services & Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group (session presentations)

Speakers:
Michael Rudy, VP Business Development, Sajan
Camthuy Nguyen, Localization Program Manager, Collaboration Software Group, Cisco WebEx
Jeff Kennedy, Manager, Engineering Information and Systems, Club Car, Inc.

P2. What Ebook Readers & Tablets Mean for Enterprise Publishing

Kindle, iPad, netbooks, Blio, Skiff, smartphones—not to mention new e-reader devices announced too quickly to track—offer enterprises many options and many more questions about mobile content device value to business. This session presents a quick overview of the current state of art in mobile content devices, and lively discussion about enterprise applications from a panel of device makers.

Moderator: David Guenette, Senior Consultant, Gilbane Group (presentation)

Speakers:
Ned May, Director & Lead Analyst, Outsell Inc. (presentation)

P3. A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation – Content Management and Metadata Across Publishing Systems

The years of development of content technologies within the enterprise have resulted in capable metadata-driven content management platforms that give publishers the means to be media-neutral and operationally efficient from publication planning through to delivery of content to customers. Two case studies provide real-world examples of how leading publishers are embracing this evolution.

Moderator: David Guenette, Senior Consultant, Gilbane Group (presentation)

Speakers:
Eric Freese, Director of Digital Solutions, Aptara Corp (presentation)
Todd Tillinghast, CEO, Snowfall Press

P4. DITA As High Tech Strategy: Plans and Vision

This interactive panel discussion will take up several high tech and software companies’ experiences in heading towards and implementing DITA.

Representatives from NetApp, VMware and FICO will compare and contrast their learnings in heading down the path towards DITA. They will share what they have learned and best practices they have developed in implementing DITA. They will also share their vision for what they still have left to do and their vision of where they want to be. Topics will include how to: organize writing teams, get writers motivated, develop information architecture, use conditions and variables, attack development of stylesheets, integrate with software development organizations and set goals for the future.

Moderator: Bill Trippe, Vice President & Lead Analyst, Content Strategies, Gilbane Group

Speakers:
Catherine Lyman, Director, Information Engineering , NetApp
Laura Bellamy, VMware, Information Architect
Tom Goering, Technical Publications-Principal Engineer, FICO

Chip Gettinger, VP of XML Solutions, SDL Structured Content Technologies Division

 

Workshops

Workshop A: Insider Guide to Selecting WCM, Collaboration, and Social Software

Instructor: Tony Byrne, Founder, CMSWatch
If you are a website or intranet manager or architect, this year may well find you looking to implement new tools or refresh dated platforms. However, you face a wide and growing array of vendors willing to address your problems. Which ones offer the best fit for your particular circumstances?

This fast-paced workshop led by CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne will help you understand the broad but converging marketplaces for Web CMS, Collaboration, Social Networking, and Web 2.0 technologies. Tony will sort out the key players and business models, and offer you a roadmap for deciding which types of technologies and vendors provide the best long-term fit for your needs.

The workshop will answer several key questions:

  • How can you quickly distinguish among the 120 major toolsets across these marketplaces?
  • How are changes in the open source landscape impacting your options today and going forward?
  • Where does Web Publishing intersect with emergent technologies?
  • What should you expect to pay for these tools?
  • What are the critical, can’t-ignore architectural distinctions you need to make?
  • How mature are the vendors?
  • What are the strengths and weaknesses of some key players, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle
  • How can you insure that your selection process meets your original business objectives?
  • Which should you pick first: Agency, Integrator, Vendor, or…?
  • What are some major pitfalls others have made that you can readily avoid?
  • How are these marketplaces likely to evolve in the coming years, and how can you best align your firm to take advantage of future innovation?

Are there other questions you want answered? Feel free to send them to Tony at tbyrne@cmswatch.com, so that he can weave them into the workshop. Or, simply bring them that day. Hope to see you there.

 

Workshop B: Learn to Develop an Actionable Intranet Strategy

Instructor: Scott Liewehr, Senior Analyst, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group
We are all intrinsically aware that a strategic plan is an critical component of any successful intranet, but most organizations tend to ignore their inner voices and jump in headfirst without one anyway. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for underachievement, and potentially disaster. Maybe it’s the process: the manner in which an intranet team arrives at such a plan can be excruciatingly long and painful… Or, it can be relatively straightforward (and some might even say “fun!”) if you know what you’re doing. By the time you leave this workshop, you will definitely know what you’re doing.

In this hands-on workshop, Gilbane’s Sr. WCM Consultant, Scott Liewehr, will guide participants through the production of an actual Intranet Strategy for a faux company. In cooking-show fashion, Scott will define the ingredients of an actionable strategy, and then lead the group through various exercises to develop all the core elements.

By the end of the workshop, attendees should expect:

  • To be convinced that an actionable intranet strategy should be no longer than 5-10 pages, often in PowerPoint format
  • To learn the essential components of an intranet strategy, and how to develop them
  • To understand how to incorporate an intranet strategy into the decision-making process going forward
  • To be able to put their learnings into action when they get back to the office on Monday!

 

Workshop C: Managing Smart Content: How to Deploy XML Technologies across Your Organization

Instructors: Dale Waldt, Senior Consultant, XML & Content Technologies, Gilbane Group & Geoffrey Bock, Senior Analyst, Collaboration & Social Computing, Gilbane Group
Smart content holds great promise. First with SGML and now with XML, we are marking up content with both formatting and semantic tags, and adding intelligence to electronic information. Using richly tagged XML documents that exploit predefined taxonomies, we are developing innovative applications for single source publishing, pharmaceutical labeling, and financial reporting. By managing content snippets in a granular yet coherent fashion, these applications are revolutionizing our capabilities to meet business needs and customers’ expectations.

What’s working and why? What are the lessons learned from these innovative applications? Does the rapid growth of web-based collaborative environments, together with the wide array of smart content editors, provide the keys to developing other business solutions? There are many promising approaches to tagging content while doing work. Yet we still face an uphill battle to smarten up our content and develop useful applications.

In this workshop, members of the Gilbane practice on XML technologies will share our experiences and provide you with practical strategies for the future. We will address a range of topics, including:

  • The business drivers for smart content
  • Some innovative content management techniques that make authors and editors more productive
  • The migration paths from ‘conventional’ documents to smart content
  • How to apply industry-specific taxonomies to tag content for meaning
  • The prospects for mash-ups to integrate content from disparate application communities

We will discuss both the rapidly developing technologies available for creating, capturing, organizing, storing, and distributing smart content, as well as the organizational environment required to manage content as business processes. We will identify some of the IT challenges associated with managing information as smart content rather than as structured data, and map strategies to address them. We invite you to join the conversation about how best to exploit the power of XML as the foundation for managing smart content across your organization.

 

Workshop E: Proving the ROI of a CMS (A Real-World Perspective)

Instructor: CM Pros & Robert Rose, Chief Troublemaker, Big Blue Moose
Let’s all admit a few things: Some men actually use skin care products. A good number of women read Maxim magazine. We all leave our empty popcorn boxes under the seat at the movie theater. And, guess what – none of us ever actually go back and measure the ROI for software that we purchase.

Every vendor you’ll speak with promises you the magic end-of-the-rainbow “Return On Investment”. They offer calculators, spreadsheets and complex algorithms promising that if you just put in the “right” numbers, you’ll see that their software isn’t so expensive after all. But somehow after putting in your estimated hours in the spreadsheet – and the hard costs of hardware – you feel empty. Unfulfilled.

And, by the way, the reason none of us ever actually go back and measure the ROI of any enterprise software solution is because we’re deathly afraid of the answer we might get. What if, after all that money and time, we actually didn’t save any money?
It’s time to stop being afraid.

In today’s economy, you’ve got to make smart purchasing decisions – but calculating ROI on any CMS by concocting some stew of “time savings” and “estimated CPU’s” and “upgrade fees” and “future employees we don’t have to hire” etc.. is a recipe for disaster. Let’s discuss the right way to create a business argument for a shiny, new CMS – from both a “Total Cost Of Ownership” (TCO) and ROI perspectives.

In this session we will:

  • Understand and define the details of the “what” we’re exactly investing in. What are the right questions?
  • Outline the process for defining what “success” looks like. What are the right answers to the question?
  • Segment and understand how much the CMS “tool” will be a part of that process
  • Develop approaches for vendors to ask them the ROI questions that gives us the information we need to make smarter decisions
  • Develop an ROI argument that’s not based solely on a geeky CFO-driven spreadsheet or “pure gut instinct”. We’ll deliver the right combination of numbers, business requirements and other elements of our market strategies to justify a purchase
  • Then, we’ll walk through an interactive case study together – a company that thinks it needs a WCMS system. Let’s walk through their current situation and see if they really do?
  • As a result of this workshop, participants should have a good handle on how to develop their own ROI argument for a CMS initiative.

 

Workshop F: The State of the CM Union

Instructors: CM Pros & Lisa Welchman, Partner, WelchmanPierpoint
These are exciting and challenging times for the Content Management industry – vendor consolidation, fundamental changes in the way people engage, the ubiquity of tools like SharePoint, the debate over the very definition of what makes a CMS – all as the discipline of managing content matures and emerges from IT.

We get the ball rolling on the pre-conference workshops with representatives from the CM Pros Board (including Scott Liewehr and Ian Truscott) and leading guest speakers (including Lisa Welchman) to look at the big picture of what it means to be a CM professional today. We’ll take a look at the trends and offer our perspectives.

We’ll also be revealing the results of our survey, ‘CMState’ – where we’ve called upon the 13,000+ members of the CM Pros extended community to tell us what’s really affecting them, their organizations and their industry. We believe it to be the first and largest survey of content management professionals of its kind.

We won’t just be talking about the technology, the vendors and the strategies, but also about our profession – what it means to be a content management professional. We’ll talk openly about our industry, and how the CM Pros organization can help and what we have planned. As our industry moves and reinvents – so must we.

In this session we will:

  • Exclusively reveal the results of our CMState survey; what are the real trends and challenges our industry is facing – in the words of the people facing them
  • Dissect some of those challenges and trends with thought-provoking presentations and workshop activities
  • Help you connect with your profession as a content management practitioner
  • Give you a primer for the rest of the conference – the sorts of questions we think you should have in mind as you enter the sessions and network with your peers