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

Instructor: Dale Waldt, Senior Consultant, XML & Content Technologies, 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 D: A Methodology for Web Governance

Instructor: Christine Pierpoint, Partner, WelchmanPierpoint

The Web is a vital platform for enabling communications, collaboration and transparency, but many organizations are exposed because of immature governance over their Web properties. New practices and technologies, such as social media and Web CMS, have a big impact on an organization and require policies and standards to make sure staff is executing in a way that limits risk. But who get’s to make the rules? IT, Marketing and Business stakeholders all share ownership of the Web which may lead to confusion or conflict over how Web decisions are made.

In this workshop Christine Pierpoint of WelchmanPierpoint will illustrate a methodology for effective Web governance. Workshop participants will walk way with an understanding of how to develop, implement and utilize mature Web governance in their organization.

Using a proven methodology, workshop participants will:

• Explore the components of the governance lifecycle, from upper-management strategy and decision-making to gathering Web team input and measuring success
• Discuss the challenges and risks many organizations face when making decisions about their Web presence and how to avoid them
• Walk through the steps for creating a Web governance framework
• View best practices and example Web governance models
• Discuss Web policies and standards and how to mitigate risks and exposures

As a result of this workshop, participants will be able to assess the maturity of their organization’s Web governance and take steps to formalize inputs and decisions related to Web policy setting and standards enforcement.