Conference Chair: Frank Gilbane

Content management has become a core requirement of all businesses, and is now necessary across all corporate functions. Most mid- to large-size companies have implemented at least one content management system, and larger companies have multiple systems in place. Implementations are usually focused on either Web content, or documents, or digital assets, or XML data. However, companies recognize they often need to integrate different types of content from multiple repositories, as well as data from other enterprise applications, in order to achieve the business benefits they had envisioned. This integration requirement means that content management initiatives need to consider both the specific requirements of individual applications, and the broader IT requirement to provide infrastructure support for integrating content across multiple applications. Our conference will help you with both project issues and strategies.

The dramatic and continuing proliferation of content management technologies guarantees that it will remain a challenge to keep up with the product technology, market landscape, best practices, and newly uncovered business benefits of content management for some time. The only way to keep ahead of the competitive curve and gain the benefits of content management without undue risk is to learn from the experiences of current, expert, and objective practitioners. Our conference brings you this expertise.

Who should attend:

• IT Strategists, Managers, Staff
• Content Management Project Managers
  
• Content Management System Designers
• Intranet, Internet, Extranet, Portal Managers
  
• Information Architects / Knowledge Managers
• Webmasters, Developers, and Administrators
  
• Business, Market, and Technology Analysts
  
• Consultants and Integrators
  
• Marketing and Product Executives

What the attendee will take away from the program:

Attendees benefit from an unbiased, deep, and up-to-date understanding of content management technologies, vendors, trends, and best practices, from the most experienced and respected experts in the field. Our speakers have implemented every kind of CM system across all industries, and have written the books that others depend on. They can help you get started, make vendor choices, benchmark your progress, or make strategic decisions. Project managers and implementers will learn from other's experiences, IT strategists will be able to make informed decisions, especially concerning integration, and business managers will understand what can be accomplished with content management technology today and what their competition might already be deploying.

Program

Keynote Panel - Interact with the Industry Experts
Tuesday, 9/9, 8:30am–10:00am

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Gilbane Report
Panelists: Steve Ashley, Robert Baird & Co.; Bob Boiko, University of Washington iSchool; Howard Shao, Documentum; Leif Pedersen, Vignette

Our annual 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 content management 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.

Content Management Projects Track:
Track Co-chairs: Bill Trippe, Gilbane Report, Tony Bryne, CMSWatch

Our Projects track focuses on the issues you face during the lifecycle of a content management project: from initial requirements definition, to vendor and tool selection, to content and metadata modeling, to rollout, to ongoing management and technology refreshment. The topics are relevant to both enterprise content management projects as well as departmental projects. Sessions will cover issues important to those just starting their first content management project, and to experienced veterans who need to keep up with the latest practices.

Projects Track Session Descriptions:

P1. Can We All Just Agree on How to Evaluate a CMS?
Tuesday, 9/9, 10:30am–12:00pm

Moderator: Bob Boiko, University of Washington iSchool
Panelists: Bob Doyle, CMS Review; Tony Byrne, CMS Watch; Brendan Quinn, BBC; Tim Hess, ThomasTech

Businesses would love to have a standard set of questions that they can use to compare and evaluate a set of content management systems. CMS vendors would love to be able provide fast, high quality answers to the blizzard of questions that customers ask. In this session representatives from the user, vendor, and solution provider communities will solicit ideas, share their opinions on CMS evaluation criteria, and describe available tools.

P2. Planning & Choosing a CMS
Tuesday, 9/9, 2:00pm–3:00pm

Moderator: Bill Trippe, Gilbane Report
Speakers: Rita Warren, ZiaContent; Dana Hallman, US General Services Administration

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 and a list of potential vendors.

P3. Are You Ready for Content Management?
Tuesday, 9/9, 3:15pm–4:15pm

Moderator: Bill Trippe, Gilbane Report
Speakers: Tina Hedlund, Comtech Services; Lisa Welchman, WebCMS

A key, and often under-planned for, ingredient for a successful content management deployment, is preparing the multiple stakeholders in your organization for what's coming and how it will affect the way they work. Content management requires change, which needs to be carefully managed. This session will provide guidance on the level of technological sophistication and organizational maturity that are optimal for a low risk/high return CM implementation, how to prepare your organization, and what kinds of organizations are the most successful.

P4. Competitive Content Analysis: A Methodology & Case Study
Tuesday, 9/9, 4:30pm–5:30pm

Moderator: Bob Boiko, University of Washington iSchool
Speaker: Fay Mark, Verisign

Are you looking for a way to ground your CMS system in solid business justifications? Are you unsure exactly what content is most important for you to manage? This session will describe a method for determining content management best practices for your site based on a simple yet effective analysis of your current site and those of your competitors. The analysis quickly tells you what your content types should be and how they should be presented.

P5. Content management strategies for multi-channel delivery
Wednesday, 9/10, 8:30am–10:00am

Moderator: Elizabeth Gooding, Art Plus Technology
Speakers: Luke Cavanagh, IKEA; Darrell Delahoussaye, Bechtel Corporation

Delivering content through multiple channels has been critical for many business applications since the early days of electronic documents. Today, achieving anticipated ROI often requires multi-channel delivery even though it can be difficult and costly to implement. Even combining a Web and print channel can be a major challenge. This session will help you understand why it is so hard, who is doing it today, and what the best practices are.

P6. The Role of XML in Content Management
Wednesday, 9/10, 10:30am–12:00pm

Moderator: Sebastian Holst, Gilbane Report
Speakers: Lauren Wood, Textuality; Vernon Imrich, Percussion

It is almost inconceivable for an enterprise content management strategy not to include XML. But just what should its role be? Should content be stored in XML or just shared in XML? Should XML be used for metadata only, content, or both? Or should XML just be used as Web service plumbing? In this session attendees learn what businesses are doing today with XML and enterprise content management, and how to think about the different roles XML can or should play in their own environment.

P7. Content Models & Information Architectures
Wednesday, 9/10, 2:00pm–3:00pm

Moderator: Bob Doyle, CMS Review, Skybuilders
Speakers: Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group; Victor Lombardi, AIG

It is tempting for businesses to look, at and even choose, content management technology first, and relegate the difficult task of analyzing and organizing the content that needs to be managed to an "implementation detail". Such a "detail" determines whether CMS deployment is a success or failure. Both enterprise information architectures and content models for specific business functions need to be developed if you expect efficient use and reuse of content. Learn what you need to do and how to get started in this session.

P8. Electronic Forms & Content Management
Wednesday, 9/10, 3:15pm–4:15pm

Moderator: Sebastian Holst, Gilbane Report
Speakers: Chuck Myers, Adobe

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. However, implementing a modern forms solution for a departmental application or small company seems to have been forgotten, and companies use a hodge-podge of technologies for building and deploying forms applications. 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.

P9. Beat the Clock with A CMS Vendor
Wednesday, 9/10, 4:30pm–5:30pm

Moderator: Tony Byrne, CMS Watch
Speakers: Whitney Tidmarsh, Documentum; Michael Meadows, GlobalSCAPE; Dan Ryan, Stellent; Vernon Imrich, Percussion; John Girard, Clickability

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.

Content Management Strategies Track:
Track Chair: Sebastian Holst, Gilbane Report

Our Strategies track looks beyond individual content management projects to issues that are important to multiple CM projects and to other business applications. Achieving many of the benefits of content management requires a content-aware IT infrastructure that supports integration among a variety of enterprise applications and repositories. This means there are important strategic and architectural decisions to be made about the role of database platforms, application servers, web services, portal and enterprise search tools, information architectures, and development tools. This track will help you formulate or fine tune your content management strategy for the future.

Strategies Track Session Descriptions:

S1. Enterprise Search: What's New & How it Relates to Content Management
Tuesday, 9/9, 10:30am–12:00pm

Moderator: Avi Rappoport, Search Tools Consulting
Speakers: Phil Green, Inmagic; Zubair Talib, i411; Steve Kusmer, Atomz; Derek Murphy, ISYS; David Bercovich, Google

Study after study shows that users don't find what they need-knowledge workers re-create existing content more often than they create original work, and business decisions are made with incomplete information. This session will explore how enterprise search engines are addressing these problems, how they relate to content management, how Web search technology fits in, what the best practices are, what's hot, and what's coming up in enterprise search.

S2. Content Management & Portals
Tuesday, 9/9, 2:00pm–3:00pm

Moderator: Sebastian Holst, Gilbane Report
Speakers: Rob Perry, Vignette; Glenn Kelman, Plumtree

Enterprise portals have grown to be wildly popular over the last few years, so it may seem strange that there are no completely pure-play portal vendors left. They have all been acquired or have added products to their portal offering. Companies now build portals using a variety of tools and infrastructure technologies. However, there is a special relation between content management and portals and many, perhaps most, existing corporate portals were built largely with CM technology. This session will explore when to build a portal on a CMS, and what role a CMS should play in an enterprise portal implmentation.

S3. Do You Need Enterprise Content Management, or WCM, DAM, DM, KM, PDM, or ?M
Tuesday, 9/9, 3:15pm–4:15pm

Moderator: Sebastian Holst, Gilbane Report
Speakers: Tony Freeman, Deepbridge; Tony Byrne, CMS Watch

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is what most of the largest CMS vendors say they offer these days. Usually this means they provide solutions for managing a variety of content types, including Web content, documents, rich media, product data, etc. Sometimes their solutions involve a single product and sometimes multiple products. Strategists need to consider when to choose a "best-of-breed" approach over an integrated suite or monolithic solution and how these similar repository solutions relate to each other and will evolve. In this session experienced practitioners will answer theses questions and share what companies are actually implementing, what their experiences have been, and what you should do.

S4. Open Source Content Management
Tuesday, 9/9, 4:30pm–5:30pm

Moderator: Bill Trippe, Gilbane Report
Speakers: Michael Wechner, OSCOM; Steven Gentner, CrownePeak; Detlef Kamps, RedDot

There are dozens of open source content management products and tools available today, and even an international association to promote them. Most companies who decide to build their own CMS use some open source technology, and many businesses that rely on commercial xontent management product also use, or integrate with some open source tools. In this session representatives from the open source and commercial vendor communities will each discuss their views on the pros and cons of an open source content management strategy.

S5. Content Integration & Information Integration
Wednesday, 9/10, 8:30am–10:00am

Moderator: Sebastian Holst, Gilbane Report
Speakers: Dan Harple, Context Media; Suzanne Larabie, Pat Shannon, ChevronTexaco

Integration was the theme of our conference last year, but as an industry we are still in the early stages of integrating the vast amounts of content residing in a wide variety of data and content repositories throughout our organizations. This is no simple task, and new products, technologies, and strategies have emerged to provide some help. Some older technologies like EAI and point-to-point integrations can help, and XML hub-and-spoke transformation tools are necessary, but new approaches that can support "real-time" content sharing are also needed. This session will examine the current options.

S6. Categorization and Taxonomy Strategies for Migrating Content
Wednesday, 9/10, 10:30am–12:00pm

Moderator: Joseph Busch, Taxonomy Strategies
Speakers: Russell Nakano, Nahava; Ron Daniel, Taxonomy Strategies; James Kane, Unisys

Categorization technology is usually used to help organize and tag content with complete and consistent attributes, for example, to place content into a pre-defined taxonomy, or generate an ad hoc taxonomy from pre-existing content. But categorization technology has many other uses as well. This session will explore how categorization technology is used to extract valuable content from legacy systems. Legacy content needs to be broken up into meaningful "chunks"-not just converted from HTML to XML, but chunked into new content models. Each of these pieces also requires metadata to identify how the chunks can be re-composed and published, and when certain chunks should be presented to certain users. In this session you will learn about automated tools, processes, and projects that have converted large sites without an army of screen-scraping contractors, or expensive programmers writing complex salvage scripts.

S7. Infrastructures to Support Content Applications
Wednesday, 9/10, 2:00pm–3:00pm

Moderator: Sebastian Holst, Gilbane Report
Speakers: Fal Sarkar, Sun; Bryan Quinn, Software AG

CMSs are being deployed in many different parts of organizations for many different purposes, and most business applications need easy access to at least some content that is being managed elsewhere. A true enterprise content strategy has to go well beyond any individual content management system, beyond integrations with enterprise systems, and even beyond the integration of multiple content repositories. Database platforms, application servers, Web service strategies, portal frameworks, and XML messaging strategies are only some of the pieces of a complete content strategy. This session examines what a full enterprise content strategy should look like.

S8. Fitting Content Management into Business Processes
Wednesday, 9/10, 3:15pm–4:15pm

Moderator: Theresa Regli, Molecular
Speakers: Randy Brandenburg, Boston.com; Craig St. Clair, Genzyme Corporation

Getting content management technology deployed and integrated with all of the various data sources and other enterprise systems so that the applications can talk to each other and the content is shareable is a big challenge. But you can't let it distract you too much from careful planning of how all this will affect business processes. In some case the changes could be radical and distributed, in other cases a carefully re-designed workflow is called for. This session looks at some of the business process repercussions of content management technologies.

S9. New Technologies That Could Influence Your Content Strategy
Wednesday, 9/10, 4:30pm–5:30pm

Moderators: Sebastian Holst, Gilbane Report, Derek Doyle, CMS Review
Speakers: Adina Levin, Socialtext; Gavin Thomas Nicol, Red Bridge Interactive

There is no shortage of new ideas or software development targeting content technologies, whether for creation, aggregation, syndication, communication or storage. In this session we'll pick a few of the hottest that are relevant to managing business content and we think you should know about, tell you what they are and why they could turn out to be important.