old Gilbane Group Blog

Another pre-conference workshop added to Gilbane San Francisco

2009-02-02T19:18:04Z

We've added a 6th pre-conference workshop:

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

Gilbane San Francisco pre-conference workshops posted

2009-01-29T17:47:25Z

The main conference program will be published in a week or two, but the 1/2 day pre-conference workshop descriptions for June 2nd have been posted at: http://gilbanesf.com/workshops.html.

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

Forrester on Community Platforms

2009-01-16T14:52:58Z

Forrester Sr. Analyst Jeremiah Owyang discusses the findings of their latest report on community platforms, "Forrester Wave: Community Platforms, Q1 2009" on his blog. He also provides a lot of information about their methodology, including how they reduced the number companies to include from 100 to 9. The full report is only for Forrester clients, but Jeremiah provides a summary which you can read here. Here's a snip from his post:

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.

We have added OpenID support to our website and blogs

2009-01-12T20:36:53Z

We have added OpenID support to our login and registration pages at gilbane.com. Our blogs also support OpenID for registering to comment.

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.

Great advice for conference attendees

2009-01-11T14:53:25Z

A 12 minute podcast on how to make the most out of attending a conference from someone who attends lots of them. He was interviewed by someone promoting the VizThink conference, but his advice applies to any conference. http://www.vizthink.com/blog/2009/01/09/how-to-be-an-insanely-great-conference-attendee/

Dale Waldt on semantic markup

2009-01-09T13:09:52Z

As I mentioned in November, Dale Waldt has joined us as a senior consultant, and yesterday he started posting on the XML blog. Check out his first post on "Why Adding Semantics to Web Data is Difficult".

CM Pros Elections: Nominations Closing

2009-01-06T15:15:57Z

The period for nominating a peer or yourself to run for one of the open seats on the Board of Directors of CM Pros closes tomorrow, January 7. Visit the elections page on the CM Pros website for details.

Blog integration - you may have been redirected

2009-01-05T19:13:14Z

In case you are looking for the CTO Blog, the Web Content Management Blog, the Collaboration Blog, or the Publishing Practice Blog, don't worry, you have come to the right place.

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.

Mark Cuban on XBRL

2009-01-04T14:33:31Z

While XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), has been in use on a voluntary basis for awhile, the long slow road to making it a requirement ended this past December with the SEC's announcement officially mandating it for large public companies (requirements for smaller companies will be phased in). We have argued for years that, as important as XBRL is from a regulatory point of view, its benefit for internal corporate and inter-company financial operations is reason enough to adopt it.

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!

Call for Papers Deadline: Gilbane San Francisco 2009

2008-12-17T17:32:08Z

The call for papers deadline for Gilbane San Francisco is January 14th, 2009.

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

Conferences, Twitter and the economy

2008-12-10T12:40:18Z

It was great to find out for sure last week at Gilbane Boston that the economy has not had too much of an impact on the conference business (we even had attendees from a few financial service companies). While I'm sure there were some people who couldn't make it because of travel or other budget concerns, our Boston conference was larger than our San Francisco conference last June. Of course most of our attendees are in IT, a sector that has not been hit nearly as hard as most others. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal wrote about a Forrester forecast that "Businesses and other organizations in the U.S. will spend $573 billion on computer software, hardware and services next year, just 1.6% more than they spent in 2008, according to new data out Tuesday from Forrester Research Inc." Clearly, this is not ideal if you sell enterprise software, but really, for a fresh forecast for 2009, this is not bad. In fact, the content technology areas we cover seem to be rolling along pretty well.

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.

Publishing with a Capital "P"

2008-12-03T15:07:07Z

Here at Gilbane Boston, we just heard from Michael Edson, Director, Web and New Media Strategy, Office of the CIO, Smithsonian Institution. His talk described the Smithsonian Institution's current Web and New Media strategy process and the cultural, technical, and organizational implications of the vision of a Smithsonian Commons--a critical-mass of content, services, and tools designed to fuel innovation and stimulate engagement with the world's scientific and cultural knowledge.

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.

Global Content Value Chains: Collaborative? Or Not...

2008-12-02T16:36:31Z

Re-posted from the Globalization blog

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!

Learn More About Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)

2008-12-02T15:16:31Z

Gilbane Conference sponsor OASIS is hosting an informal "learn more" session about the new Content Management Interoperability Services, CMIS, at Gilbane Boston, tomorrow, Wednesday, December 3, at the Westin Copley hotel. The CMIS gathering is at 1:00 pm in the St. George room. Meet some of the developers of the standard.http://gilbaneoston.com

Question the analysts from wherever you are

2008-12-01T15:06:29Z

Whether you can make it to Gilbane Boston this week at the Westin Copley or not, if you have a question for our analyst keynote panel (IDC, Gilbane, Forrester, 451, Burton), let me know, either here, via email, or via twitter (this looks like a perfect use for twitter).

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