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See what happened at our Spring content management conference in LA

2004 Conference Program

Click on a session to see its description, or scroll down to see all track and session descriptions.

View or download the presentations

PDF version of Conference Program (349k)

Track Descriptions

• Content Management (CM)
• Enterprise Search & Knowledge Management (KM)
• Content Technology Works (CTW)
• Digital Asset Management (DAM)
• Document & Records Management (DM)
• Enterprise Information Integration (EII)

Session Descriptions

Keynote Sessions:

Opening Panel: Industry Analysts on Technologies & Trends

Our opening plenary panel looks at the big issues affecting content management strategies, including trends in the market, technology, and best practices. Frank Gilbane will moderate a keynote panel of analysts covering content management technologies who are thought leaders debating content management vs. enterprise content management, the role of database platforms, application servers, portals, open source, information integration, Web services, and other infrastructure technologies critical to content management strategies. We'll also look at upcoming technologies, market consolidation and the tough issues facing both vendors and users, and make predictions about the next 12-18 months. This panel is designed for anyone with a stake in content management whether project manager, business manager, IT strategist, consultant, integrator, market or financial analyst, or vendor, and will provide an informed context for what you will hear in the rest of the conference and see in the exhibition.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, Editor & Publisher, The Gilbane Report

• Steven Ashley, Senior VP Research, Baird & Co.
• Joshua Duhl, Research Director, Content Management and Rich Media, IDC
• Hadley Reynolds, Vice President & Research Director, Delphi
• Robert Markham, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
• Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Vice President North America, Ovum
• Mike Maziarka, Director, InfoTrends/CAP Ventures

Keynote Panel: “Open” Document Formats, XHTML vs. HTML, XSL vs. CSS & Other Industry Debates

There are a number of difficult decisions that partly transcend choices about content management products and are crucial to successful content technology deployments and strategies. These decisions are tricky because there are competing, overlapping standards to choose from, sometimes created by the same industry expert organizations. This panel of industry pundits who understand these issues will look at all sides of the debates, peel away the hype, translate the issues into non-technical language, and provide you with a clear understanding so you can make your own well-informed decision. We will look at a recent European Commission report (the “Valoris (PDF) ” report) that recently examined the current state of document formats, in particular Microsoft’s XML reference schemas and the OpenOffice.org XML format, and made recommendations on which were “open” and had enough industry support to provide for broad interoperability. Although OpenOffice and Microsoft Office both provide comprehensive XML support, there are still subtle differences that need careful consideration. Is one of these “open” formats for you? The choice between XHTML and HTML for Web content can also be daunting. How do you choose between them? Can you mix them? Is there a migration strategy that makes sense? The W3C has also published both Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), but which style sheet technology should you use where? Are there other options? Is one approach more “open” than the other? What are the practical implications of each approach? What are the relevant technical, legal, policy, and resource considerations?

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair

• Jon Udell, Lead Analyst, InfoWorld
• Bob Boiko, Author, The Content Management Bible, Lecturer, University of Washington iSchool, and President, Metatorial Services
• Tony Byrne, Editor, CMSWatch; Author, The CMS Report
• Matt May, Web Accessibility Specialist, W3C

CTW Keynote Panel: Enterprise Panel on Best Practices & Implementation Strategies

Speakers in the keynote session for the CTW track complement the opening keynote on technology and trends by sharing their experiences with actually putting content technology to work. This panel features enterprise executives who will describe how their companies leverage the technologies discussed in the first keynote. We'll examine actual business and IT planning scenarios and identify the characteristics associated with successful content technology deployment. The panel sets the stage for the day's track of user success stories and case studies.

Moderator: Mary Laplante, VP Consulting Services, Bluebill Advisors, Sr. Editor, Gilbane Report

• David B. Liroff, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, WGBH Educational Foundation
• Mario Queiroz, Vice President, Content and Product Data Management, HP
• Bill Benz, Vice President MIS, J. & W. Seligman

Conference Sessions

Content Management (CM track)

Our content management track covers what most people consider content management issues and technologies. This includes both web content management (WCM) and enterprise content management (ECM). Whether you are a project manager, IT strategist, or business manager, you will find every aspect of planning, selecting, building, deploying, enhancing or replacing a content management system covered in this track. The faculty includes a wide range of well-known and respected content management consultants and authors, so you can be sure what you learn is based on experience and expertise.

CM-1: Planning for & Evaluating CMSs - How to Get Started

A content management system is a critical investment, especially since businesses need to integrate content management with other core business applications. This session will help you get started by providing guidance on how to determine the scope & purpose of a CMS, what types of CMSs are available, the trade-offs between building and buying, which organizations should be involved in choosing and owning a CMS, and how you should develop a list of requirements, questions, and a list of potential vendors.

Moderator: Mary Laplante, VP Consulting Services, Bluebill Advisors, Sr. Editor, Gilbane Report

• Lisa Welchman, Principal, Welchman Consulting, Planning & Preparing for a CMS
• Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Vice President North America, Ovum, The Content Management Market
• Mary Lee Kennedy, Principal, The Kennedy Group, Content Requirements and Understanding User Needs for a Content Strategy

CM-2: Implementing a Content Management System – Next Steps & Key Issues

Once you are confident you have a good grasp of the basic requirements for your content management system, and have started looking at different types of approaches, you need to dig into more detailed requirements of the users of your CMS, give careful consideration to your organization’s IT infrastructure and capabilities, and make sure you understand what you can/should expect from IT and from potential vendors for support. This double session will cover multiple topics you need to be familiar with to move from planning to implementing a CMS with confidence.

Moderator: Ann Rockley, Author, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, and President, The Rockley Group

• Ann Rockley, Author, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, and President, The Rockley Group
• Bob Boiko, Author, The Content Management Bible, Lecturer, University of Washington iSchool, and President, Metatorial Services, Building a CMS Logical Design
• Ben Martin, Principal, Industrial Wisdom, Multilingual Content Management - How to Tame the Shrew

CM-3: Implementing a Content Management System – Next Steps & Key Issues (cont.)

Once you are confident you have a good grasp of the basic requirements for your content management system, and have started looking at different types of approaches, you need to dig into more detailed requirements of the users of your CMS, give careful consideration to your organization’s IT infrastructure and capabilities, and make sure you understand what you can/should expect from IT and from potential vendors for support. This double session will cover multiple topics you need to be familiar with to move from planning to implementing a CMS with confidence.

Moderator: David Guenette, Associate Editor, Gilbane Report

• Brendan Quinn, Technical Architect, Content Management and Syndication Systems, BBCi, CMS Impacts on Systems, Networks, Security, and IT Support
• Michael Hahn, Senior Content Management Analyst, Vasont Systems, Are DTDs Dead?

CM-4: Directions in Content Manageemnt

An important part of implementing a CMS is understanding what new technologies and will be available and what new practices will emerge in time to have an impact on your new system after it is deployed. This session will look at near-term developments and help you prepare for follow-on enhancements and also help you deal with the inevitable question, “Why didn’t we implement XXX capability”?

Moderator: Hilary Marsh, President, Content Company

• Eric Silberstein, Founder & Chairman, Idiom, Inc.
• Rich Buchheim, Sr. Director Product Management, ECM Strategy, Oracle
• Bill Hustad, Director of Product Management, Interwoven

CM-5: One Minute with a CMS Vendor

In this lively session a representative group of content management vendors will be asked a question by an expert CMS consultant and each given one minute to respond in turn before a buzzer goes off. If you prefer immediate, succinct answers to your questions over mining through piles of literature or sitting through presentations or demos this is the session for you.

Moderator: Tony Byrne, Editor, CMSWatch; Author, The CMS Report

• Chip Gettinger, VP Product Marketing, Astoria Software
• Vernon Imrich, CTO, Percussion Software
• Todd Peters, Principal, Paperthin
• Todd Price, VP Product Marketing and Management, Stellent
• Bill Hustad, Director of Product Management, Interwoven
• Jim Howard, CEO, CrownPeak

CM-6: Content Management Resources: How to find Who, What, and Where

The rapid proliferation of content management systems makes it very difficult to find all the vendors that might have the right solution. This session will survey online product directories, including some that are searchable for CMSs with specific features and technologies, and offer side-by-side, head-to-head competitive comparisons. Enterprise project managers will learn how to use these online resources to narrow their product selection and how to find the right consultants to aid with implementation. Vendor marketing teams can insure that their products are being described correctly and positioned properly vis-a-vis the competition. Consultants will find places to advertise their skills on the web and some knowledge feeds to strengthen their websites. Analysts will discover active discussion groups commenting on the rapid evolution of the industry.

Moderator: Bob Doyle, Editor-in-Chief, CMS Review, CMS Forum, CMS Wiki, DMOZ CMS Category

• Bob Doyle, Editor-in-Chief, CMS Review, CMS Forum, CMS Wiki, Editor, DMOZ CMS Category
• Erik Hartman, Hartman Communicatie BV

Enterprise Search, Knowledge Management & Collaboration (KM Track)

Each of these topics are important on their own, but when you look at the way most companies implement KM or collaboration or a portal, you will always find some combination of these approaches and technologies, usually also combined with categorization and taxonomy efforts. In this track you will learn about these technologies, as well as how people actually use them to share and leverage existing and emergent knowledge, especially in R&D environments.

Track Chair: Lynda Moulton, LWM Technology Services

KM-1: Enterprise Search & Knowledge Management

Searching for information is a pervasive activity in any enterprise. How will search play with other enterprise activities to enhance the value of knowledge repositories? What effect will categorizing techniques and technologies have on results? Improving the value of content through better “finding” mechanisms will be highlighted in this session.

Moderator: Lynda Moulton, LWM Technology Services

• Walter Crosby, Executive VP, Terabase, Search Trends – The Value of Categorization over Clustering
• Sue Feldman, Research Vice President, Content Technologies, IDC, Why Categorize? How Structuring Information Yields Better Search
• Mark Ludwig, Library Systems Manager, University of Buffalo, It’s a Knowledgebase not a Database; Why Using an XML Repository is a Better Paradigm

KM-2: Collaboration and Knowledge Management Best Practices

“KM” has been on the scene for a decade now, but we are still learning new and valuable ways to leverage knowledge. Through collaboration and other knowledge-sharing techniques – and by embedding KM directly into everyday processes – organizations continue to reap major rewards from KM. In this session, our three speakers will present their perspectives on these trends and best practices.

Moderator: Larry Chait, Chait & Assoc.

• Sherra Pierre-March, Vice President of Information Systems, Sesame Workshop, Integrating Content Management and Portal: A Case Study
• Ken Bruss, HDA Consulting, Embedding KM into Product Life Cycle Management – Achieving Sustainable Competitive Advantage
• Mary Lee Kennedy, The Kennedy Group, Human Knowledge – Enabling the Exchange of Ideas and Expertise

KM-3: Knowledge Management & Technology Panel

The landscape of KM technology is ever changing. Exciting new technologies are coming on the scene, and older technologies are being used in new and innovative ways to leverage knowledge, enhance access, and support the bottom line. After brief presentations by the panel members, the speakers and attendees will participate in a moderated discussion of trends in KM technology.

Moderator: Larry Chait, Chait & Associates

• Jeff Catlin, CEO, Lexalytics, The Synergy of Search + Content
• Jane McLaughlin, President & Consulting Principal, & Tom Spencer, Partner, Lifecycle Software, Case Study: Leveraging KM Tools and Content Management to Create Profitable Products
• Joyce Ward, Lexis/Nexis, Leveraging Content Technology Downstream to Enhance KM

KM-4: Taxonomy as a Knowledge Roadmap

Taxonomy in portals and search applications should reflect terminology and concepts that focus the searcher on categories of content. At their best, taxonomies provide us with a knowledge roadmap, structuring content into visible lists that enlighten our understanding of what lies within. They must also enable the search function to perform more efficiently. The speakers will describe how basic taxonomy concepts are evolving to meet today's challenges, provide examples of next-generation taxonomies, and talk about surmounting deployment challenges.  

Moderator: Lynda Moulton, LWM Technology Services

• Lynda Moulton, LWM Technology Services, Controlled Vocabularies need Context – Taxonomy to Ontology
• Wendi Pohs, IBM, IBM’s Intranet Search and Enterprise Taxonomy
• Theresa Regli, Senior Consultant, Content Management and User Experience, Molecular, Multi-use Taxonomies: Search, CMS and Navigation

Content Technology Works (CTW track)

The Content Technology Works™ track focuses on analyses of successful deployments of content technologies from the enterprise user’s perspective. While there are thousands of implementations of content management technologies, accepted best practices are still difficult to find. The Content Technology Works initiative, which is administered by The Gilbane Report, addresses this critical need. Our CTW program is designed to identify and verify emerging best practices. Through our published CTW case studies, we share successful implementations in a marketing-free environment so that more companies can gain the confidence to implement and benefit from content technology. The CTW track comprises presentations by users who have been there and done that. Our user speakers will provide insight and advice about what does and doesn’t work based on real experience.

Track Chair : Mary Laplante, VP Consulting Services, Bluebill Advisors, Sr. Editor, Gilbane Report

CTW-1: Solutions for Complex Content Applications

Speakers will share their experiences with deploying technologies that handle the heavy lifting that’s required when complex content drives an organization’s business.

Moderator: Mary Laplante, VP Consulting Services, Bluebill Advisors, Sr. Editor, Gilbane Report

• Cindy Johnson, Director, Education & Knowledge Organization, IDX, Multi-channel Publishing for Medical Technology
• Dominique Wissmann, Technical Manager, Thermo Electron Corporation

CTW-2: Solutions for Leveraging Rich Media

As the cost of creating and storing digital assets drops, companies are recasting enterprise processes such as training, brand management, and channel communications to incorporate rich media. Speakers will share their experiences with deploying content technologies that enable their organizations to incorporate rich media into their business strategies and capitalize on the value of digital assets in the process.

Moderator: Mary Laplante, VP Consulting Services, Bluebill Advisors, Sr. Editor, Gilbane Report

• Howard Roth, Media Consultant, CMP Media, Rich Media in Publishing
• David MacCarn, Chief Technologist and Asset Management Architect, WGBH Educational Foundation
• Amy Rantanen, Director of Information Technology and Asset Management Systems, WGBH Educational Foundation

CTW-3: Solutions for Custom Communications

“Content my way” is the mantra of today’s demanding customers. Speakers will share their experiences with deploying technologies that enable customized, personalized communication with customers, prospects, partners, and vendors.

Moderator: Mary Laplante, VP Consulting Services, Bluebill Advisors, Sr. Editor, Gilbane Report

• Kosta Nicolopoulos, Director of Marketing, RC Hagen

Digital Asset Management (DAM track)

There is certainly a large overlap between Digital Asset Management (DAM) and ECM. While analysts and practitioners may debate the degree of overlap in functionality, we don’t know of anyone who would argue that there are not applications that require a set of capabilities that are not usually found in ECM systems. This track covers DAM issues and technologies for enterprises, with an emphasis on marketing, publishing, and brand applications. If you are interested in DAM, you should look at this track as well as the CM Track.

Track Chair: Mark Walter, Senior Consultant & Analyst, The Gilbane Report

DAM-1: Digital Asset Management - Architectures, Approaches and Functionality

You’ve been assigned a project to get your hands around your organization’s digital assets, and are now faced with fully understanding and matching your requirements with many different types of solutions on the market from DAM vendors, ECM vendors, database vendors and others. How do you sort through the landscape? What differentiates DAM from other types of content management applications? How do you ensure you meet your organization’s business requirements, and also pick an approach compatible with corporate IT integration and infrastructure requirements?

Moderator: Mark Walter, Senior Consultant & Analyst, The Gilbane Report

• Tony Freeman, ExecutiveVP, DeepBridge Content Solutions
• Mark Arbour, General Manager, Rich Media Business Unit, EMC/Documentum
• Jeff Stromberg, Vice President, Digital Asset Management, Stellent

DAM-2: Managing Digital Assets for Conventional Marketing Applications

For many enterprises, their first DAM implementation creates a graphics library of brand images and product shots that are critical to the marketing team. How will your business take advantage of this repository? How will it improve your internal operations and change your external supply and distribution chains? What ROI can you expect on your investment? This session explores use cases for DAM that show how it can improve the way you create, produce and distribute your sales and marketing collateral, promotions and catalogs, and at the same time lay a foundation for future enterprise DAM applications.

Moderator: Mark Walter, Senior Contributing Analyst & Consultant, Gilbane Report

• Diane Rooney, Vice President, Grand Circle Travel
• Joseph Bachana, Founder, DPCI
• Scott Bowen, President & COO, Artesia Technologies, an Open Text Company

DAM-3: Managing Digital Assets for One-to-One Marketing

To improve customer acquisition and retention, marketers are shifting from mass mailings to micro-marketing techniques. How do you customize and personalize content cost-effectively on a large scale? What part does a DAM system play in an overall solution? Come and learn how industry pioneers are building systems that automate custom publishing by integrating the graphics transformation engines of a DAM system with the databases of customer and product information and the templating of print and web publishing tools.

Moderator: Mark Walter, Senior Contributing Analyst & Consultant, Gilbane Report

• Roger Gimbel, Principal, Gimbel & Associates
• Heather Mazzeo, Global Applications Business Manager, Reebok International Ltd

Document & Records Policy & Management (DM track)

Document and records management are receiving dramatic increases in attention these days. The need for both has not diminished with the increase in web applications. Instead, there are more (electronic) documents and records than ever to be managed. And with ECM vendors acquiring these capabilities and marketing their newly combined (or not) solutions, companies are being re-educated in the need to manage all their content. Combine this and with new security and compliance requirements associated with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, etc., and the result is a need for companies to review the rules and policies regarding many different types of documents, records, and digital content. This track will look at how to deal with these issues in today’s more complicated digital corporate environments.

DM-1: The Latest on Managing Electronic Records

By mapping out a content and storage architecture organizations can provide business units with a more seamless approach to managing the full life-cycle of content, from its generation through its retention or destruction, and providing users with more seamless access to content by providing transparent performance and protection. This session will define a framework that organizations can use to establish a corporate policy, review the current IT strategy and analyze the existing technology portfolio, and only then select a vendor, install and integrate software, and begin managing the ongoing process of capturing, classifying, archiving, reviewing, and destroying records. Critical steps will be described including relating the IT strategy and existing technology portfolio back to the organizational policy regarding records and communications, considering a storage strategy, discussing enterprise content and records management (RM) needs, and considering the need for archiving forms of electronic communication other than e-mail, such as instant messaging.

Moderator: Robert Markham, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

• Robert Markham, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
• Priscilla Emery, President and founder, e-Nterprise Advisors
• Galina Datskovsky, PhD, CEO, MDY Advanced Technologies, Inc.

DM-2: Digital Rules Management & Compliance for Enterprise Applications

DRM is usually associated with Digital Rights Management, which is focused on the protection of copyright holders, and mostly of interest to commercial digital publishers. However, while rights management may be mild interest to many enterprises, applying business rules to various kinds of corporate content has become extremely critical. Protecting trade secrets, sensitive information about employees, customers, and suppliers, and regulatory compliance requirements resulting from Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, etc. make it imperative that all companies learn how to ensure that their information has effective security, access, and use rules associated with it. This session will look both at what some of the requirements are, and what kinds of content technologies can help.

Moderator: Bill Trippe, Co-author, Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology , Sr. Editor, Gilbane Report

• Glen Secor, J.D., LL.M., Senior Consultant & Analyst, Gilbane Report, Enterprise Content and Rights Management for Successful Content Protection, Data Security, and Information Compliance
• Mike Miron, CEO and co-Chairman, ContentGuard, Using Digital Rights Management Technology to Manage Business Rules
• John Bruce, CEO, Authentica
• Martha Nalebuff, Director of Policy and Strategy, Windows Client Strategic Relations and Policy Group, Microsoft Corporation
• Joe Fantuzzi, CEO and President, Workshare

DM-3: Electronic Forms & Content Management

There is a wide range of electronic form solutions available today, ranging from simple scripts packaged with mass market web publishing software to very specialized industrial strength applications for forms-intensive industries coming from older document management systems. Electronic forms will be very big once they are easy to create, modify, and integrate into larger enterprise applications. Microsoft and Adobe are both targeting this space and looking for huge market share of this forgotten middle market, and ECM vendors are acquiring or partnering with electronic form software vendors to round out their offerings and protect their turf. There is a lot you need to pay attention to here. This session will help you understand the landscape of current capabilities and provide insight into what will be available soon.

Moderator: Bill Trippe, Senior Consultant & Editor, Gilbane Report

• Chuck Myers, Technology Strategist, ePaper Solutions Group, Adobe
• Paul Chan, VP Marketing, PureEdge

Enterprise Information/Content Integration (EII track)

The problem is simple and familiar; you have built multiple content, document, and database repositories across your organization. They may all work just fine on their own, and you may have even connected a few using EAI, or implemented a way to share information between them using some kind of a conversion tool. But you have realized that to accomplish the kinds of productivity, efficiencies, and ROI you expected from your individual applications, you need information integration, which is much more complicated than application integration, to be the rule rather than the exception. To accomplish that, you need easy, fast, reliable, and cost-efficient ways for applications to share content. This track will look at the issues and technologies and approaches associated with this increasingly important area.

EII-1: Enterprise Information Integration: What it is & Why You Should Care

In addition to the databases you need to access for your internet applications to deliver on their promise, you have a rapidly growing number of content, document, and digital asset management systems deployed in your organization, all of which contain critical content for your CRM or e-commerce, or publishing or marketing or portal/intranet application. How do you integrate these applications and content? EAI and other approaches are not sufficient on their own, mostly because of the complexities of managing unstructured or semi-structured content. This session will help you understand what those complexities are and how Enterprise Information Integration (EII) and Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) solutions can help.

Moderator: Dale Waldt , President aXtive Minds

• Joshua Duhl, Research Director, Content Management and Rich Media, IDC
• Tony White, Senior Analyst, Collaboration & Content Management, Yankee Group
• Scott Gidley, Integration Consortium, Founder, Research and Development,
  Dataflux

EII-2: New Approaches to Enterprise Information/Content Integration

While the problems EII offerings are meant to solve are easy to describe, it is not at all easy to determine what the best solution is, or where to look for it. To some degree, all enterprise software applications need to at least facilitate integration with other applications, but integration can be very complex – how do you know when you need a special kind of technology partner, and what are the options? This panel will explore different approaches to EII, including those from EII/ECI, Application Server, EAI, XML Database, and ECM vendors, and help you identify a set of functional characteristics to make an informed choice.

Moderator: Mark Walter, Senior Contributing Analyst & Consultant, Gilbane Report

• Shane Lennon, VP Marketing, Context Media
• Eric Sall, Program Director, Information Integration Marketing, IBM
• Rob Perry, Director of Product Marketing, Vignette
• Tim Mathews, President and Co-Founder, Ipedo
• Bill Rosenblatt, President, GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies
• Colin Britton, CTO & Executive VP, Metatomix

Post-conference Workshops

These intensive half-day sessions immediately follow the main conference and will help you accelerate your project through a level of immersion not possible in a larger conference.

Web Content Management Systems: Principles, Products & Practices

Tony Byrne, Founder & Principal, CMSWatch

Join us for a half-day workshop that can help you and your team define a
clear Web Content Management roadmap. CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne leads
an intensive, fast-paced, introduction to Web Content Management
principles, practices, and products. Learn:

• A common, de-jargoned vocabulary of key CMS terms
• How to develop a business case for a CMS
• Key steps to effective Content Production and Delivery
• The 7 categories of CM products, including features and typical price ranges
• Specific features of a sample package in each category
• How to start evaluating and select suitable technologies for an organization
• The 4 most common CMS pitfalls, and best practices for avoiding them

The seminar enables attendees to help their organization define its CMS
needs and identify suitable technologies to improve Web content
production and publishing systems. In a seminar that takes a
vendor-neutral approach, attendees will learn how to apply best
practices in Web Content Management.

Content Technology Choices for Technical Communicators

Bill Trippe, Senior Consultant & Editor, Gilbane Report

The need for single-source publishing has led technical communicators to implement many authoring, publishing, and management tools. At the same time, organizations have been implementing enterprise content solutions, as customers and partners demand instantaneous access to all kinds of product-related content and data.

• How can technical communicators best leverage all of these new technologies?
• What are the potential uses and best uses of critical technologies such as XML and PDF?
• What role does metadata play?
• Can content systems and tools be integrated with other critical systems such as call tracking?

This tutorial will provide attendees with a current understanding of the state of content management technology for technical communicators, and will highlight best practices for integrating single-source publishing tools within the enterprise.

Enterprise Search - Principles, Players, Practices, & Pitfalls

Erik Arnold, Infozen, Inc. and Co-founder of Arnold Information Technology

Join Erik for a half-day workshop that can help you and your team prepare for an enterprise search deployment. Erik Arnold - formerly of Lycos and NBCi and now FirstGov.gov - leads an informative, content rich review of the basics of enterprise search, including principles, key players, practices, and pitfalls. Learn:

• The six best practices for a successful enterprise search system.
• How to develop a business case for a search system, including the hot spots for cost overruns with tactics for avoiding them.
• The terminology of enterprise search, including key distinctions between site search, Internet search, and niche search for database content and highly technical information
• The landscape of enterprise search with 12 industry leading enterprise search products categorized and compared by cost, content strengths, and principal features, including a look at the Google Appliance, FAST Search & Transfer, Autonomy, Verity, Endeca, Mondosoft, and Blossom.
• Guidelines for preparing a search roadmap, including a checklist of the key points for a requirements document.
• The six most common enterprise search pitfalls and best practices for avoiding them.
• Search engine marketing and what it means for you. Enterprise search systems that support URL mapping and hit boosting. Learn how to maximize traffic to specific pages or content on your Intranet or public facing Web site.

This seminar equips attendees with essential information to acquire an enterprise search system that will meet the needs of the organization's users. The seminar is vendor neutral. Attendees will learn specific facts and insights that will reduce the likelihood of vendor lock-in and a mismatch between needs and system functionality.

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