Pre-conference Workshops

Our pre-conference workshops provide in-depth information and a level of practical advice not possible in the shorter conference sessions. Each workshop is taught by highly regarded experts with years of practical experience and teaching in their respective topic areas.

Workshop A: Insider's Guide to Selecting WCM, Collaboration, and Social Software

Instructor: Tony Byrne, Founder, CMSWatch

If you are a website or intranet manager or architect, this year may well find you looking to implement new tools or refresh dated platforms. However, you face a wide and growing array of vendors willing to address your problems. Which ones offer the best fit for your particular circumstances?

This fast-paced workshop led by CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne will help you understand the broad but converging marketplaces for Web CMS, Collaboration, Social Networking, and Web 2.0 technologies. Tony will sort out the key players and business models, and offer you a roadmap for deciding which types of technologies and vendors provide the best long-term fit for your needs.

The workshop will answer several key questions:

• How can you quickly distinguish among the 120 major toolsets across these marketplaces?
  
• How are changes in the open source landscape impacting your options today and going forward?
  
• Where does Web Publishing intersect with emergent technologies?
  
• What should you expect to pay for these tools?
  
• What are the critical, can't-ignore architectural distinctions you need to make?
  
• How mature are the vendors?
  
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of some key players, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle
  
• How can you insure that your selection process meets your original business objectives?
  
• Which should you pick first: Agency, Integrator, Vendor, or...?
  
• What are some major pitfalls others have made that you can readily avoid?
  
• How are these marketplaces likely to evolve in the coming years, and how can you best align your firm to take advantage of future innovation?

Are there other questions you want answered? Feel free to send them to Tony at tbyrne@cmswatch.com, so that he can weave them into the workshop. Or, simply bring them that day. Hope to see you there.

Workshop B: Learn to Develop an Actionable Intranet Strategy

Instructor: Scott Liewehr, Senior Analyst, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group

We are all intrinsically aware that a strategic plan is an critical component of any successful intranet, but most organizations tend to ignore their inner voices and jump in headfirst without one anyway. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for underachievement, and potentially disaster. Maybe it's the process: the manner in which an intranet team arrives at such a plan can be excruciatingly long and painful... Or, it can be relatively straightforward (and some might even say "fun!") if you know what you're doing. By the time you leave this workshop, you will definitely know what you're doing.

In this hands-on workshop, Gilbane’s Sr. WCM Consultant, Scott Liewehr, will guide participants through the production of an actual Intranet Strategy for a faux company. In cooking-show fashion, Scott will define the ingredients of an actionable strategy, and then lead the group through various exercises to develop all the core elements.

By the end of the workshop, attendees should expect:

• To be convinced that an actionable intranet strategy should be no longer than 5-10 pages, often in PowerPoint format
• To learn the essential components of an intranet strategy, and how to develop them
• To understand how to incorporate an intranet strategy into the decision-making process going forward
• To be able to put their learnings into action when they get back to the office on Monday!

Workshop C: Managing Smart Content: How to Deploy XML Technologies across Your Organization

Instructors:
Dale Waldt, Senior Consultant, XML & Content Technologies, Gilbane Group
Geoffrey Bock, Senior Analyst, Collaboration & Social Computing, Gilbane Group

Smart content holds great promise. First with SGML and now with XML, we are marking up content with both formatting and semantic tags, and adding intelligence to electronic information. Using richly tagged XML documents that exploit predefined taxonomies, we are developing innovative applications for single source publishing, pharmaceutical labeling, and financial reporting. By managing content snippets in a granular yet coherent fashion, these applications are revolutionizing our capabilities to meet business needs and customers’ expectations.

What’s working and why? What are the lessons learned from these innovative applications? Does the rapid growth of web-based collaborative environments, together with the wide array of smart content editors, provide the keys to developing other business solutions? There are many promising approaches to tagging content while doing work. Yet we still face an uphill battle to smarten up our content and develop useful applications.

In this workshop, members of the Gilbane practice on XML technologies will share our experiences and provide you with practical strategies for the future. We will address a range of topics, including:

• The business drivers for smart content
• Some innovative content management techniques that make authors and editors more productive
  
• The migration paths from ‘conventional’ documents to smart content
• How to apply industry-specific taxonomies to tag content for meaning
• The prospects for mash-ups to integrate content from disparate application communities

We will discuss both the rapidly developing technologies available for creating, capturing, organizing, storing, and distributing smart content, as well as the organizational environment required to manage content as business processes. We will identify some of the IT challenges associated with managing information as smart content rather than as structured data, and map strategies to address them. We invite you to join the conversation about how best to exploit the power of XML as the foundation for managing smart content across your organization.

Workshop E: Proving the ROI of a CMS (A Real-World Perspective)

Instructor:
CM Pros
Robert Rose, Chief Troublemaker, Big Blue Moose

Let’s all admit a few things: Some men actually use skin care products. A good number of women read Maxim magazine. We all leave our empty popcorn boxes under the seat at the movie theater. And, guess what – none of us ever actually go back and measure the ROI for software that we purchase.

Every vendor you’ll speak with promises you the magic end-of-the-rainbow “Return On Investment”. They offer calculators, spreadsheets and complex algorithms promising that if you just put in the “right” numbers, you’ll see that their software isn’t so expensive after all. But somehow after putting in your estimated hours in the spreadsheet - and the hard costs of hardware - you feel empty. Unfulfilled. And, by the way, the reason none of us ever actually go back and measure the ROI of any enterprise software solution is because we’re deathly afraid of the answer we might get. What if, after all that money and time, we actually didn’t save any money? It’s time to stop being afraid.

In today’s economy, you’ve got to make smart purchasing decisions – but calculating ROI on any CMS by concocting some stew of “time savings” and "estimated CPU's" and "upgrade fees" and “future employees we don’t have to hire” etc.. is a recipe for disaster. Let’s discuss the right way to create a business argument for a shiny, new CMS – from both a “Total Cost Of Ownership" (TCO) and ROI perspectives.

In this session we will:
• Understand and define the details of the “what” we’re exactly investing in. What are the right questions?
• Outline the process for defining what “success” looks like. What are the right answers to the question?
• Segment and understand how much the CMS “tool” will be a part of that process
• Develop approaches for vendors to ask them the ROI questions that gives us the information we need to make smarter decisions
• Develop an ROI argument that’s not based solely on a geeky CFO-driven spreadsheet or “pure gut instinct”. We’ll deliver the right combination of numbers, business requirements and other elements of our market strategies to justify a purchase
• Then, we’ll walk through an interactive case study together – a company that thinks it needs a WCMS system. Let’s walk through their current situation and see if they really do?
• As a result of this workshop, participants should have a good handle on how to develop their own ROI argument for a CMS initiative.

Workshop F: The State of the CM Union

Instructors:
CM Pros
Lisa Welchman, Partner, WelchmanPierpoint

These are exciting and challenging times for the Content Management industry - vendor consolidation, fundamental changes in the way people engage, the ubiquity of tools like SharePoint, the debate over the very definition of what makes a CMS - all as the discipline of managing content matures and emerges from IT.

We get the ball rolling on the pre-conference workshops with representatives from the CM Pros Board (including Scott Liewehr and Ian Truscott) and leading guest speakers (including Lisa Welchman) to look at the big picture of what it means to be a CM professional today. We’ll take a look at the trends and offer our perspectives.

We'll also be revealing the results of our survey, 'CMState' - where we've called upon the 13,000+ members of the CM Pros extended community to tell us what's really affecting them, their organizations and their industry. We believe it to be the first and largest survey of content management professionals of its kind.

We won't just be talking about the technology, the vendors and the strategies, but also about our profession - what it means to be a content management professional. We'll talk openly about our industry, and how the CM Pros organization can help and what we have planned. As our industry moves and reinvents - so must we.

• Exclusively reveal the results of our CMState survey; what are the real trends and challenges our industry is facing - in the words of the people facing them
• Dissect some of those challenges and trends with thought-provoking presentations and workshop activities
• Help you connect with your profession as a content management practitioner
• Give you a primer for the rest of the conference - the sorts of questions we think you should have in mind as you enter the sessions and network with your peers