Gilbane Group News & Articles

Tony White of the Gilbane Group began his talk on the evolution of the Web CMS market with an observation. White, apparently something of an early-bird, spotted 22 people in his hotel lobby at 6:30 a.m. this morning. Over half of the people there were taking advantage of the free wifi to browse the Web, while only one person was reading a newspaper. He asked the attendees to imagine how different the behavior of his fellow early risers would have been even as little as five years back.

In a fast-paced talk, White went on to share some of his observations as a consultant specialist in Web CMS. He resumed the market briefly as a wide spectrum from low-end point solutions to complex enterprise platforms, with almost no correlation to price, and warned attendees of putting too much trust into analysis that assume a correlation between cost and quality, as it may not be the case.

How many reports does it take before Web Content Management vendors change their errant ways and start listening to customers?

If you were to look at the recommendations from The Gilbane Group (news, site) and their Justifying Web Content Management: The Business Case and ROI report, then there is still a sharp learning curve ahead of many.

A simple four-word summary of the report, sponsored by SDL Tridion (news, site), might as well go “Keep it simple, stupid”. While that could be a tad simplistic -- and we’ll be looking at why -- it is a conclusion that keeps hitting the reader smack-bang in the face.

Summer. San Francisco. Content management, social media and other related geekiness. Dreams do come true.

Gilbane just released their conference program for the June 2-4 Gilbane SF 2009 conference. Still under the motto of “Where content management meets social media,” the conference is focused on business implications of content strategies: from general content management decisions to using social media wisely.

As warranted by the current economy, every piece of the program is tied to the business impact of modern content solutions. There are four major areas to be discussed at the conference:

1. Web Business & Engagement
2. Managing Collaboration & Social Media: Internal & External
3. Enterprise Content, Search & Publishing
4. Content Infrastructure

While the content management industry may blur various lines within and outside of itself, for today’s businesses every decision and possible impact must be crystal clear. Dollar figures don’t appreciate any form of vagueness.

Conference attendees can select from more than 40 educational sessions, interactive panel discussions and workshops. Some of the topics include:

• Planning for a CMS
• WCM Team Building
• Web Content Management Best Practices
• Integrating Your CMS with Social Media
• Delivering Global Customer Experience in Challenging Times
• Justifying Enterprise Social Media Investments
• Improving SharePoint Search & Navigation with a Taxonomy and Metadata
• Content Integration Standards: CMIS and JSR 170/283

Product labs are also part of the deal. Another perk is direct interaction and one-on-one time with Gilbane’s community of enterprise practitioners, analysts, consultants and solution providers. Registration info is here.

Where, you ask? This time around — in Boston. The upcoming Gilbane Boston 2008 Conference gives us thrills, that’s how exciting the conference program looks. Gilbane announced that the conference will focus on exploring the intersection between social media and content management.

With social media and social networking forecasted by Gartner to be some of the hottest strategic trends for 2009, organizations need to be better prepared to integrate successful combinations of Web Content Management, enterprise search, text analytics, social computing and more to achieve greater results.

Following up on its latest study on how global businesses need to actively create, manage and publish multilingual content, the Gilbane Group is hosting a webinar on Wednesday, September 24, at 2 p.m. EST.

The webinar is dedicated to helping companies develop enterprise strategies that are crucial for creating, managing and publishing multilingual business communications.

Gilbane has released a report that any organization catering to the global community needs to have a look at. It’s entitled Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Companies Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain — don’t be swayed by the less-than-captivating and very long title. It’s chock full of qualitative research on how global businesses are creating, managing and publishing multilingual content. The short answer is that they’re not.

The very last panel I attended at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco was also one that I had the privilege of moderating. Our topic was the big hot topic of the conference: how to integrate social networking features into the enterprise and whether or not they can co-exist happily with a content management system. Specifically in our panel’s case, we talked about Facebook’s utility. The net takeaway from our panel was — it’s all about the platform; Facebook matters because of its ability to integrate outside applications.

After navigating the murky lands of translation and globalizing content, I attended a panel at Gilbane that was a detailed look at XML and its importance in content management. The overall message I left with at the end was that XML was “tremendous technology” and as one panelist put it, “the most important integration tool in software today”.

Yesterday I attended a panel on everyone’s favorite topic: how to bring Social Computing concepts into the enterprise moderated by Geoffrey Bock, a lead analyst for the Gilbane Group. Panelists included Ross Mayfield, Founder, SocialText; David Hersh, CEO, Jive Software, Ed Cuoco, Co-founder, Spathe and Rusty Williams, SVP Product Planning, Mzinga.

Next up on our coverage of the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco was the “mini keynote” for the “Web Content Management” track which was a panel discussion with some big names in the WCM space, moderated by Tony White, a Lead Analyst for the Gilbane Group.

The panelists present were Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO of FatWire; Erik Aeyelts Averink, of SDL Tridion; Bjarne Hansen, President, Sitecore USA; David Graham, CIO, Vignette and Jim Howard, CEO of CrownPeak. The first round of the panel consisted of each panelist discussing what they thought were the most pressing issues when picking a potential Web CMS provider.

The Gilbane Group has delivered a new report on the use of Social Media in the Enterprise. The report, called Collaboration and Social Media 2008- Taking Stock of Today’s Experiences and Tomorrow’s Opportunities includes a survey of medium and large American organizations, case studies and a vendor catalog.

What we learn from reading the report is that social media applications are slowly supplementing the existing collaboration technologies — email, websites and shared workspaces — within organizations today and that vertical social media solutions are emerging to help them work smarter.

Much like The Simpsons’ Troy McClure, you may know that group called Gilbane from the myriad of conferences and fact-filled newsletters which they’ve so graciously provided to those of us who are content management practitioners.

Not content to bask in the glow of their triumphs, Gilbane has added yet another blog to their notable stable — XML Technologies & Content Strategies is here to cast the light on our XML foibles.

Gilbane San Francisco 2008, the annual West Coast shindig for Web CMS and myriad other geekage, is currently accepting proposals for panels and presentations. Your stable of appropriate topics may include:

• Web CMS
• Enterprise wikis, collaboration, blogging (erg)
• Content globalization and localization
• “Enterprise 2.0,” enterprise search, or semantic technologies
• Enterprise CMS
• Digital rights management
• Publishing technology

(Guys, please don’t make this a Twitter-fest.)

Your deadline is January 15, 2008. Hurry and submit a proposal.

The conference will take place at Westin Market Hotel, San Francisco, from June 17-19. Marketh thy calendars.

Global CMS and infrastructure purveyor Day Software has announced plans to air its suite of Web 2.0 offerings at Gilbane Boston from 27-29 November.

You can catch it all at the Westin Copley, where the Gilbane Boston conference has oft been held.

Trying to work out how to bring innovation to the archaic practice of document imaging?

Prick your ears up for this webinar sponsored by KnowledgeLake. It takes place on Thursday November 8, 12 PM CCT.

Listen in as Bill Trippe of Gilbane and Bob Bueltmann of KnowledgeLake discuss the practical aspects of SharePoint, enterprise CMS and various platform strategies. The event is sponsored by KnowledgeLake.

Register with them. When you do, you’ll receive a white paper on SharePoint and the “platform approach” to document imaging solutions, courtesy of the smart folk at Gilbane.