How your corporate website looks and functions has a powerful impact on your business. A content-rich site where customers can learn about your business is one of the best ways to show them how ready and willing you are to serve their needs. Attendees of this session will learn various methods and strategies to utilize the web to support business strategy and vision. Bachana will provide a detailed and in-depth presentation highlighting the best practices and typical struggles companies have while building and supporting their Web content management strategy.

While content management systems on the market today have similar functionality, it is often difficult for customers to differentiate which is the best solution for their needs. Bachana will offer real-world case studies showcasing both painful and successful examples alike. Through his intuitive knowledge of the industry he will offer how to properly maintain and streamline a web content solution. Additionally, he will share his thoughts on what is needed and what to avoid when selecting a Web content solution for your organization.

Bachana will also explore the impact of Web 2.0—the importance of understanding how to properly integrate blogs, wikis, podcasts, webinars, video, and other user-generated content. Attendees of this presentation will learn about these new interactive tools and how they can be leveraged to deliver personalized, one-to-one experiences as well as broader based communities.   

Topics to be covered:

• Business drivers for the site – site as ‘platform’ for a business, not just a collection of technologies or widgets
• Workflow considerations, including change management aspects
• Business and functional requirements, approaches to information architecture, wireframing, and taxonomies
• Platform considerations based on the organization’s particular requirements or constraints
• Procurement planning
• Implementation management including risk management strategies and project management

While many businesses are updating firewall block lists to prevent their employees becoming FaceBook zombies, smart businesses are looking for ways to harness the interest in social networking to make their employees more productive. By going beyond building networks for the sake of it, businesses can increase collaboration and communication between employees with social networks that actually have a point.

Web content management systems often suffer because the people that use them are geographically-distributed and unfamiliar with each other. When employees go home at night, they regularly solve these same problems on FaceBook and MySpace – regularly finding and reconnecting with long lost friends. Bringing that technology and enthusiasm into business hours, can dramatically increase the number of weak ties between people within the business, making it easier to find the skills and knowledge that you need, when it’s needed.

With user adoption being one of the key concerns with any content management system roll-out, providing ways to make people feel more comfortable and welcome in the system is essential to success. This session will look at the techniques used in various social networks and other forms of collaboration software that can enhance user adoption and keep bringing users back to the CMS instead of reverting to emailing Word documents.

Despite the benefits, social networks can very easily become time sinks and distractions, hindering productive work. Finding the right balance between keeping users happy and keeping users on task requires a delicate hand and constant review and improvement. This session will look at what can be done to keep the vampires at bay and focus users on getting work done, without taking all the fun out of work.

Finally, the session will take a look at the various technologies and standards that can help you actually bring this new social world to reality and integrate it with existing systems.

Running a procurement and evaluation process for a CMS project can be resource intensive and stressful. On top of that, a typical CM professional may only conduct CMS process a few times during their career.

Based on lessons learned from over 350 evaluation processes, this very practical, vendor neutral session will provide hands on tips, insider knowledge and advice to make your life easier and select a CMS that most matches your needs.

Key areas covered are:

• How to efficiently gather your requirements without creating a monstrous requirements document
• How to structure your RFP/RFT so that it can be evaluated efficiently
• A look at examples of RFP/RFT documents, what makes them good, bad or ugly?
• How to pose the right questions to vendors
• How to evaluate a vendors’ answers and read between the lines
• Inside the mind of a vendor: how a vendor operates, prices and shows signs of genuine interest in your project
• How to structure vendor presentations and who to invite
• How of structure an efficient low risk / high reward “hands on” evaluation of a solution
• How to check a vendors references and credentials to make sure you’ve selected the right partner
• What is fair to ask of a vendor and what might be asking too much

Running evaluations can be inefficient and difficult to manage. At worst, your evaluation process, no matter how well intentioned and planed, may offer very little value to the selection process compared to just picking a system at random.

Given the time, money and effort involved, you and your career cannot afford to make the wrong choice. This unique session will provide you with the hands on tips and advice to conduct an efficient and effective selection process, even if it’s your first one.

Are you looking to re-design your site, but are afraid to look into a new CMS? This talk will address real-world solutions to move data from one CMS to another, including real-world problems such as link management, related content, and data import. Most current CMS solutions have methods to import data although they all have different strengths and weaknesses, knowing your business goals and your content will help you in deciding which CMS is right for your project.

Remember, size doesn’t matter, even if you’re building a large CMS project. You can learn how to leverage tools and processes to work more effectively on your own project.

With many successful high profile implementations, open source web content technologies have changed from being too risky to consider to too risky to ignore.  Organizations looking to redirect licensing expenditures to web design and customization now have legitimate options that they need to understand.

There are a number of enterprise ready open source web content management solutions that deliver necessary functionality while creating opportunities to control costs. However, most companies know very little about open source software models and find their usual selection techniques ineffective to evaluate these technologies. Furthermore, open source is not a homogeneous class of software. There are many different open source business models and organizational structures that affect customer experience with the solution.

In this presentation, Seth Gottlieb will discuss the types of business needs that are well supported by the leading open source web content management technologies. He will also describe the different types of open source projects, how to evaluate them, and what types of companies tend to succeed with them.

Many organizations now rushing to adopt web content management systems (CMS) to support their online strategies think it’s the silver bullet to solve their website challenges and power content-rich applications. But web developers, online marketers and other front-line web pros speak of a fundamental disconnect in the promise of CMS vs. reality.

Industry research and harsh anecdotal evidence indicate that 50% or more CMS projects “fail” in some way: botched implementations, lack of user adoption, soaring project costs, launch delays, ruined SEO and more.

Therein lays the central tenet of The CMS Myth: When it comes to web content management success, it’s not just about the technology. In reality, CMS success hinges on your plan, your people, and your process behind your web content management initiative. CMS isn’t automatically a silver bullet.

This session is presented by two veteran web and CMS experts at interactive agency ISITE Design, and who also publish the blog CMS Myth. It’s designed to help individuals and their organizations understand the CMS Myth, overcome challenges, and learn key opportunities for content management success.

Attendees will walk away with concrete examples of CMS and website strategies to bring back to their organizations for immediate impact, ideas around web governance, information architecture, search engine optimization, social media, editorial process and more. And they’ll learn specific examples of how the Myth has played out in organizations, and how others have followed best practices to avoid common challenges. We’ll solicit best and worst practices from session participants, and use their experiences to illustrate key points of the Myth.

This session will benefit anyone whose job role touches the website, a CMS, or web marketing environment, whether they own a CMS or are planning a CMS deployment. We want to help you avoid those CMS landmines.

Attendees will gain an understanding of the 2008 Web Content Management marketplace. CMS Watch analyst, Jarrod Gingras, will lead a session explaining the categories of web content management system vendors and specific characteristics of vendors in each category. The session concludes with a look at the trends CMS Watch analysts have observed happening within the Web Content Management product landscape.

Content administrators, those who are responsible for creating, editing, and publishing information in a content management system, are critical to the long-term success of any solution. This session highlights the core skills required for content administrators and presents a standard training outline for topics such as content modeling, publishing to multiple locations, version control, embedding and linking, date-sensitive publishing, and role-based content control. All skills will be illustrated in a live demonstration. The session will also cover best practices for training and organizational change management for content administrators.

The combination of XML and XQuery provided by XML Content Servers are helping organizations become more agile with their content and enabling them to dynamically deliver a wide range of content in context to the web. In this session you’ll learn about some of the key technical drivers behind XML Content Servers including a review of live customer deployments where agility was a key to success.