Content Management Strategies & Trends
Observations from the Gilbane Content Management show in Boston
Life was good at the Gilbane Content Management conference in Boston November 28–30 featuring seventy content management vendors in one room, three days of informational sessions and awkward jokes about meta data. In an unexpected twist, two ISITE Design folks were upgraded from attendees to presenters as a previously booked guest failed to show. The impromptu presentation was a smashing success, with the group being invited back to speak at the San Francisco conference this April.
Here is what George Ross, Jeff Cram and David Aponovich observed at the Boston show.
George Ross, Director of Technology, ISITE Design
As strange as it might sound to some people, I found myself truly excited to go to a conference dedicated to content management systems and enterprise search. Not knowing what to expect, I found almost every major CMS vendor represented, and quite a few lost souls faced with the daunting task of selecting a solution. The tradeshow looked like a very strange version of speed dating.
One of my most bizarre conference experiences (ever) was ISITE Design's rapid promotion from attendee to speaker. Ten minutes before a session started, a Gilbane representative frantically approached me about the possibility of filling in for a sick speaker. The topic? Creating a High Value User Experience. With barely enough time to read the abstract, Jeff Cram and I managed to fill an hour with what I hope was a lively, entertaining and informative session. We were officially invited back to be a permanent speaker at the next conference, so it must have been a decent presentation. It was certainly not scripted. I will be curious to read the evaluations.
I spent most of my time in the enterprise search track. This topic is one of the most interesting emerging debates. I say debate because there is no clear correct way to address enterprise search. You have several camps including Faceted Search, the Holy Grail of Google, Federated Search and a few more. Since search is everywhere (email, embedded in point solutions, websites, desktop), the idea of having just one solution for all your needs seems daunting, if not impossible. We will follow this closely as this topic continues to mature.
Jeff Cram, Managing Director & Co-Founder, ISITE Design
We do a lot of work helping clients develop content management strategies, so the Gilbane conference was a fantastic chance to meet key partners, network with peers and soak in the presentations. Highlights included:
- Conference buzz: Microsoft, Oracle and IBM are now all serious contenders in CMS, creating a divide between platform players and solution companies. Only time will tell who thrives and survives. It's clearly making folks nervous.
- Most ironic moment: The open source CMS vendor on the keynote panel was a no show.
- Most interesting technology: I ran across Baynote, which has some intriguing behavioral search and content targeting products. CEO Jack Jia (former CTO of Interwoven) gave an outstanding presentation. It has the potential to turn search and navigation upside down (in a good way).
- Hot topic of the show: Faceted search
- Words of Wisdom: Guy Creese of the Burton Group advocated companies start paying attention to content analytics to understand the real cost of producing, managing and monetizing content on your web site.
David Aponovich, Sales and Marketing Manager, ISITE Design
Content Management Gets More Fragmented
Remember how vendor consolidation was supposedly going to make it easier to identify the right content management technology? Judging by the vendor crowd at Gilbane, there's still a big and fragmented market for content-related tools that continues to get bigger and more fragmented.
Let's see: We have enterprise content management vendors who have been stuffing all sorts of applications into their suites, big platform players (hello, Microsoft Vista) not to mention established best-of-breed software vendors touting web CMS, search, analytics and other apps vying for pieces of the market.
If that was not enough, now a bunch of Web 2.0-ish tools have joined the parade, literally and figuratively edging into the established players turf.
Pitching their case at Gilbane were upstart firms offering corporate-strength wikis for internal collaboration; blog tools for simplifying project management; web workspace tools; new kinds of search widgets and more. Even the co-creator of the VisiCalc spreadsheet Dan Bricklin is in on the game; he presented on his new web-enabled product, wikiCalc.
Help Wanted: Corporate Blogmaster
The rise of corporate blogs has produced a new job title you can expect to see more of in 2007: blogmaster.
Nora Barnes, a marketing expert at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, told the Gilbane crowd that several high profile companies (right now mostly in media organizations, such as BusinessWeek) have hired a full-time web staff to manage and coordinate the activity of multiple internal bloggers.
With approximately 10% of Fortune 500 companies and 17% of the Inc. 500 publishing one or more blogs, the prevalence of blogmasters will only increase as the blog evolves as a high-value channel for interacting with (and marketing to) customers.
