2009 Pre-Conference Workshops

A: How to Select a Web Content Management System
Instructor:  Seth Gottlieb, Principal, Content Here

Selecting a CMS is not like your typical software selection. Unlike other software categories, the CMS marketplace has no clear winners and there are hundreds of viable solutions. You have options of commercially licensed software , software as a service, and open source software and the systems themselves are all highly configurable frameworks so it is difficult to tell what is an aspect of platform and what is an aspect of the demo . There is no one size fits all solution because your content is tightly bound to business processes and structures that are unique to your organization. Unlike accounting and other operational aspects of your business, there are few industry-accepted standards for managing web content. Maybe the problem with the system you are replacing is not the technology but how you are using it. Selecting a CMS is hard but it is not impossible.

In this session Seth Gottlieb will offer pragmatic advice for conducting an effective CMS selection and will walk through a process to help you to:

• Analyze your requirements to the optimal level of detail
• Understand what you need in a software supplier
• Evaluate potential solutions
• Know what to expect through implementation and beyond

B: Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management
Instructor: Lisa Welchman, Founding Partner, Welchman Pierpoint

Managing a Web site takes more than just selecting the right technologies or a series of one-off projects. Rather, managing a Website is an integral operational function of an organization. Join Lisa Welchman for a workshop where she outlines the fundamentals of Web Operations Management, a discipline that takes Web management out of the arena of ad hoc projects and silo d technology and moves it into the more mature operations arena.

Lisa will detail the 10 steps that must be taken to successfully manage high-value, efficient Web sites and discuss the four dimensions of Web Operations Management including:

• Strategy: Developing a Web Operations Management strategy
• Governance: Defining Web policies and standards
• Execution: Building an effective and complete Web team
• Measurement: Measuring the success of your Web properties

C: Getting Started with Business Taxonomy Design
Instructors: Joseph A. Busch, Founder and Principal, & Ron Daniel, Principal, Taxonomy Strategies LLC

Business users are more active than ever in the publication and consumption of information. However, many organizations are struggling to engage business users in managing the information they create and consume so that it can easily be found and reused. Information retrieval methods like metadata and controlled vocabularies, historically used only by librarians, now need to be made accessible for use by typical business people. As the content management process is democratized to business users, taxonomy and metadata must adjust to suit those users.

Unfortunately, many organizations have failed to make this adjustment. As a result, many taxonomies are overly complex and far from intuitive for the end users. This problem is exacerbated by confusion about the definitions, uses, and applications for taxonomies and metadata.

This workshop will provide an introduction to taxonomy and metadata benefits, design concepts and implementation strategies. It will also provide detail on a practical design methodology that will allow you to begin designing a business taxonomy for your own organization. Topics covered during the workshop will include:

• Distinction between traditional and business taxonomies
• Justification for a business taxonomy
• Importance and purpose of a taxonomy within an enterprise portal, search engine or other knowledge management tool
• Planning a taxonomy project
• Defining use cases
• Key Components to a Successful Taxonomy Project
• Running a taxonomy workshop
• Defining a value statement
• Defining audiences
• Defining activities (what you do, what people want to do)
• Defining topics

E: Sailing the Open Seas of New Media
Instructor: John Stone, President, CrossTech Partners, LLC

Everyone is talking about social media. Social networks are growing by the day with more and more people joining. New networks are popping up all over the place. Companies are challenged with building out community platforms around their products and services. Corporations are trying to figure out what social media is and how to integrate both the corporate communities and public social media platforms into their businesses.

Where do you start? Should you be on Twitter? What about Facebook? How do you go about building out a platform solution? This workshop will teach new media techniques, including blogging and social media as well as how all of this ties into business strategies and goals. It will provide a roadmap for building out and integrating these solutions.

Join John Stone, President of CrossTech Partners. John is and an experienced digital and social media strategist with over 20 years experience in technology, marketing and sales.

F: Making the Business Case for Content Globalization
Instructor: Andrew Draheim, Principal, Kidd & Draheim

Content solutions aim at improving time to value and time to market while keeping costs under control. Rather than writing and translating the same thing many times, there are ways for streamlining the management of "enterprise content.” One of the most experienced implementers will provide you with insights that will help you to make informed and profound decisions for investing in global content management.

Managing content that will be created, used, and published in many parts of the world brings up questions like:

• How will information be published around the world and delivered to customers?
• Can we streamline our processes and save time or money?
• What technology do we need to acquire, and can the investment be justified?
• How much time do we have before we will need to see results?
• Which licensing model works for us: SaaS, OpenSource, or Commercial?
• How will we avoid typical implementation pitfalls, delays and budget creep?
• How will we manage change and increase user acceptance?

This workshop will help you find answers to those questions. It is aimed at business and technical managers from organizations that need to provide information for more than one market, country, or region, as well as any knowledge-management professional dealing with international multilingual communications. Participants in this workshop will:

• Review application scenarios to define the "must haves" and "wants" for good global content management
• Learn what technologies are available today and which ones must or can be involved in a global translation and content management solution
• Understand financial implications and potential cost savings
• Receive directions on designing specifications that help getting best value solutions that are on time and on budget
• Acquire knowledge and techniques to increase user acceptance.

H: Time for a New Look at Open Source CMS?
Hosted By: The Content Management Professionals Association (CM Pros)

The open source CMS market is maturing and, with the increase in competition, the competitive landscape is changing. The historical leaders have been supplanted by new names, and there is a new emergence of enterprise support for open source tools. With the current economic state, more corporations are taking a new look at the open source CMS options.

This workshop promises to be an interactive and engaging session, enabling you to pose your questions to our panel of experts in a collaborative environment. The session will have representation from end users, analysts, and the open source vendor community. Three 20-minute presentations from each group will be followed by our expert panel discussion, and completed with several round table open discussions on the topics that are most meaningful to you. Attendees will benefit from:

• A fresh look at the open source landscape,
• An understanding of the critical issues surrounding an open source implementation, and
• Evaluation criteria as to whether or not an open source solution is right for them.