Events News & Articles

Hangin’ around the Switzerland area this September? Be sure to mosey on over to the Magnolia Conference for an open source good time.  

The conference, held in Basel, Switzerland, will consist of keynotes and sessions with business and technical topics in regard to Magnolia CMS (news, site). Speakers include Pascal Mongold and Boris Kraft, Magnolia's CEO and CTO, respectively. Additionally, some folks from Day Software, Aperto, and several other companies and institutions are scheduled to make an appearance as well. The whole shebang will then close with an "Unconference-style" event run by the attendees.

Here's a closer look at the schedule:

Presentation Day, September 10th

During Presentation Day, participants of Magnolia Conference will gain the knowledge they need to build simple open source content management solutions with Magnolia CMS through expert instruction, hands-on tutorials and case studies.

Community Day, September 11th

Community Day will be an Unconference. This means that attendees themselves will be responsible to propose talks, vote for talks, present, share, question, inquire and otherwise make the event.

For more information on the event, including a detailed schedule of speakers, head on over here. If you aren't going to be anywhere near Switzerland but would still like to get out and shake some hands, check out our complete list of events for something a little closer to home. 

Forget Paris in the spring. Do it in the Fall this year, particularly if you are involved, interested or even vaguely curious about open source software.

That's because in October, the second Open World Forum with the Open Source Think Tank will take place in Paris and bring together the key global players in the Free, Libre and Open Software (FLOSS) community.

Conceived as a ‘meeting point’ where industry movers-and-shakers, community leaders, politicos and CIOs could all bang their collective heads together, this year’s event will focus on FLOSS as one of the key drivers in the development of the digital industry.

One of the final sessions at Gilbane SF yesterday was around content standards: CMIS, JSR-170 and JSR-283.

Many realize there are several challenges with CMIS in particular and efficiently working with content from disparate content repositories in general.

The session aimed at shedding light on some of these challenges and possible solutions in the standards space.
 

It should come as no surprise to you that one of the keys to the value of Web content is the ability for people to find it. But how to enable that is the question. Yesterday afternoon at Gilbane SF, Bill Rogers, CEO, Ektron, and Christian Burne of Oshyn, spoke to this topic during a presentation about optimizing SEO.

Moderator Tony White, Lead Analyst, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group, opened the discussion by asking the audience, “What sorts of things are you doing to optimize search on your site?”

The response? Just the lonely sound of crickets chirping.

One of the most anticipated sessions here at Gilbane SF was the Keynote Industry Analyst Panel moderated by Frank Gilbane. Unsurprisingly, the panel revolved largely around all things social media.

As Gilbane pointed out, it is the second time in a row when this panel is "focused on social media. That fact itself is a very import thing to consider."

Back with more advice from Gilbane SF! In case Seth Gottlieb’s talk on how to select a CMS yesterday didn’t leave you feeling brave enough to take on the sea of solutions, we have another option: Let someone else pick it for you.

Today’s onstage tag team for the timid consisted of Tony White, Lead Analyst, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group, and Scott Liewehr, Strategy Practice Lead, Onesta. White began the presentation by explaining in detail his own personal process for matching vendors with clients, and Liewehr held up the end with a discussion about defining needs before solutions, rather than vice versa -- something many of us are guilty of.

The Gilbane conference is about content management, of course. But this year, it’s apparently also all about the people. Frank Gilbane made a quick appearance this morning to acknowledge the people. The facts: This year‘s audience represents 16 different countries and a variety of different industries; a melting pot of people.

Kicking us off from this new angle as the first keynote speaker was Kumar Vora, vice president and general manager of Enterprise, Adobe (news, site).

The second opening keynote at Gilbane SF was presented by Tricia Bush, group manager at SharePoint, who looked a bit into the crystal ball and focused her speech on the future of doing business on the internet and the promise of web content management.

Social media. This particular phenomenon is arguably the biggest thing on the Web right now, and it’s getting bigger every day. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine being active on the Web without somehow participating in social media.

But, on the off chance that you’ve completely missed the social media bus and you’re scrambling to figure out exactly why it’s taking the Web by storm, take solace in knowing that you’re not alone. John Stone of Crosstech Partners held a workshop at this year’s Gilbane SF Conference to explain the bare bone basics.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we cover tons of solutions every day. In fact, Seth Gottlieb, founder of Content Here says there are somewhere between 1,700 and 2,000 products out there that call themselves content management systems, so options certainly aren’t the problem. But how exactly to select one? There’s a pressing issue.

Today’s guidance comes directly from Gottlieb, who today held a workshop at this year’s Gilbane San Francisco conference in hopes to teach us all exactly how to find our perfect Web CMS match. And trust us, it’s not as scary of a process as it may seem. Rather than provide ultimate or magic answers, Gottlieb's refreshing words heavily focused on getting back to the basics.

This year's Gilbane SF started with a day of pre-conference workshops. In one of them -- Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management -- Lisa Welchman, founding partner of WelchmanPierpoint, discussed the challenges faced by today's web teams.

"Web managers tend to have the world wide web on their shoulders," said Welchman, emphasizing the enormity of complexities that go into web operations management. If web operations management is not done right, one of the outcomes is poor web experience, resulting in lost revenue. But there are ways to make your web operations efficient and successful.

We're in the final stretch before Gilbane conference kick-off next week in San Francisco. If you’re still not registered, save some money (US$ 200) by using the CMSWIRE code.

For all of you who we will see in a few days, here are some of the happenings that are not to be missed.

I spent this past week in Orlando, Florida at EMC World 2009. This year enterprise content management vendor EMC (news, site) put their best foot forward in an effort to make Content Management and Archiving (CMA) attendees -- otherwise known as Documentum users -- feel like they were attending a conference that was addressing their needs.

For the most part, they succeeded. Here's a summary of what transpired.

At the J. Boye Philadelphia 2009 conference, Wienerberger's Volker Gruenauer was awarded the Overflight Award for the best presentation of the event. An interactive marketer at Wienerberger -- the Austria-based largest brick manufacturer in the world -- Gruenauer designed and deployed a customer-centered web presence that transformed Wienerberger's business even in a tough economy for builders.

A second-place award was given to Donna Spencer, author of the new book Card Sorting from Rosenfeld Media and a respected information architecture practitioner with MaadMob in Australia.

The Overflight Award is given to J. Boye conference presentations that are highly credible -- from fresh voices or perspectives to the discipline of information management -- and are rooted in actual accomplishments, such as projects that have been built and that are "take it home and do it Monday" practical.

Special consideration was given to those presentations that were likely to have a lasting effect on the field.

A panel of industry experts selected the winners, who received trophies and an additional cash prize for first place.

It's no secret that SharePoint (news, site) is one of the most widely used platforms for collaborative document management. It has enjoyed an impressive grassroots growth pattern that has pleased Microsoft, but made many IT managers a little nervous -- especially in light of ongoing regulatory compliance pressures.

Open Text (news, site) has spent a great deal of time looking at how SharePoint functions in typical Enterprise CMS scenarios. Understanding both its strengths and weaknesses, their Microsoft Solutions Team focuses on differentiating fact from fiction when it comes to what SharePoint can do.

In a conversation with Lynn Elwood, Open Text's Microsoft Solutions Product Manager, we picked up some insights worth sharing.