Web Content 2007 began and ended with a bang. About 100 attendees and 24 presenters engaged in two days of spirited discussion about website content, content management systems, blogs, search marketing, information architecture, RSS, email and plenty more. Based on assessments returned after the event, attendees claimed to have learned a lot and found the conference to be a great value.

The Web Content 2007 Team would like to thank all of the extraordinary speakers, attendees, sponsors and moderators who made the maiden voyage of the conference a huge success.

If you attended, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the conference! Hit us here on the blog, or post your comments on the Web Content 2007 Confabb page.

If you missed the conference, you can still check out the presentations. We’re posting web versions of them (when available) Visit the presentations page

See you next year for Web Content 2008!

Making it Personal: Designing “My” Web

Jen Consalvo likes to go searching for clams with her dad. But she doesn’t like to go searching for the information she wants. She knows you don’t either. She knows you’d rather have it delivered in a more personal way.

In her work as Director of Personalization at AOL, Jen is seeing the amount of personalized information delivered over the Web intensify. In the past, personal information delivery was reserved for places like Amazon.com and a few others. Suddenly it’s everywhere, from news sites, to music sites, to children’s toys.

Jen says these types of personal content delivery sites are popular with users (aka: people who buy things), because they require less effort on the part of the users, and add more value to their day-to-day on-line life.

She and her team are responsible for bringing this type of end user value to AOL, and she’s been very busy doing just that. As a matter of fact, she started her personalization efforts working with RSS. When that caught on, personalization morphed into helping people customize the content they receive. Even more, the end goal is to customize the entire Web experience, helping users discover content they may not have found on their own.

She likes to think of it as “Taking some of the work out of it for people.” AOL has some exciting new products that do this and will be rolling out soon. One is the new version of Feed Reader. It has some cool new features described by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch. And for those of you attending Web Content 2007, you will get a sneak preview of it and one or two more of AOL’s top-secret personalized content delivery products during Jen’s presentation.

She will give you an overview of the incredible innovation going on with personalization over the Web, and what she calls the most important factor in developing new products for the web. Hint: It has to do with your customers. Hear her discussion at Making it Personal: Designing “My” Web on Day Two of the Content Development and Management track

Did you know that most IT departments can only apply 20 percent of their resources to new business opportunities? That’s because, according to EMC Software, IT departments spend most of their time managing all of the information that organizations create and store, taking care of all the software applications and their updates and licenses, tending to the networks of servers, and juggling storage. Sound familiar?

That’s why EMC has spent a great deal of effort creating information lifecycle management (ILM) software to help you store, manage, protect, and share information more easily. EMC is the world leader for information management and storage, and has web content management (WCM) solutions to manage content, layout and publishing process, utilizing Documentum WCM software.

EMC has easy-to-use solutions for Web publishing, that serve non-technical users through WYSIWYG interfaces, wizards, and guides. Yet functionality is robust enough for advanced users and techy types. The products use XML technology to allow multiple output publishing and on-the-fly updates.

To help manage all the great content you create using these tools, invite the EMC extended families in to help you get organized. The Captiva family of products can automate the process of converting document contents into information that is usable for all enterprise business processes.

The Documentum family helps you easily share and reuse content across business areas or safely share with outside partners, vendors, and customers.

And the Documentum ApplicationXtender family performs high-speed image capture and storage allowing you to organize, and deliver fixed-content images, documents, reports, and more.

Yes, there’s a lot more, but why don’t you just ask them at Web Content 2007? The families would love to meet you.

Download EMC white paper on ILM

When eZ Systems says they are globally-minded, they aren’t kidding. Company employees represent 23 nationalities who have a presence in offices in Norway, Denmark, Germany, Ukraine, France, and North America. And, they like to share. Those qualities in a society have been known to make the world a better place. As a corporate philosophy, those qualities have made eZ the world’s largest open source content management software company.

eZ uses a combination of open source solutions and enterprise software, so you get the openness of sharing and eZ’s total product responsibility. eZ Publish combines various features to give you everything you might need, from a starter package, through platinum-level customization and support services. You can download a two-week trial for only $10 dollars.

And if you want extras, eZ offers add-ons and partner products. One add-on you can preview is Online Editor, which offers Web site editing through a WYSIWYG interface. You can read more about this in Bergfrid Skaara’s article. She will lead you through the workings of Online Editor and show you an example of a Website interface. You can even try it out online using a demo Web interface. It’s fun.

eZ has a diverse list of trustworthy clients that includes Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), NASA, the United Nations, and the National Library of Norway. So don’t be afraid to check them out.

And while you’re at Web Content 2007 check out Stale Eikeri, chief operating officer and acting managing director of eZ North America. He is presenting A Pragmatic Look at Web 2.0 – Moving Beyond the Hype, Day One of the Tools and Technology track. He’ll be sharing his thoughts on how organizations of different sizes can apply the interactive concepts and technologies of Web 2.0 to become a winner on the web.

Salim Ismail isn’t afraid of getting burned. One reason is because he knows what’s hot. Not like Paris Hilton knows what’s hot, but like the head of Brickhouse at Yahoo! knows what’s hot. Salim is helping drive innovation at Yahoo through Brickhouse, the newly launched program for rapid product development. He uses a team to evaluate cool ideas from within the company, brings them in to Brickhouse, and builds them up.

The first hot product to come out of Brickhouse is Pipes, a product Tim O’Reilly calls, “a milestone in the history of the internet.”

Pipes is basically an editor for structured data and RSS feeds. So you can combine many feeds into one, and remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application. It’s the first way for non-programmers to mash up data on the web creating new ways to see only the information they want.

One of the hottest Pipes on the site is New York Times through YouTube, where headline keywords from The Times home page are mashed up with video from YouTube that is relevant to those key words. The results turn up anything from a fake video on President Clinton’s Last Days In Office, to early game show clips of The Price is Right.

When Salim isn’t busy building great new products, you can find him on his blog, You’ve Got Ismail, discussing new technology, his latest venture, or just cool stuff he likes. But at Web Content 2007, he promises to give us two fabulous chances to hear what he has to say. He is presenting on Day One, part of the Tools and Technology track, about RSS: The Publish/Subscribe Model. And he’ll also be giving the closing key note, Semantic Web – How Web 2.0 is changing the way we manage content on the web.

Salim says, “Web 2.0 technology is forming the basis of a nervous system on the Internet.” That’s how he sees the future of the internet. And at his key note presentation, he will be giving a technology framework for the Web 2.0 concept, which is changing the way the Internet works–from what we now know as “search,” to the complex organism it has become, one with technology that acts much the same way memory does. Sounds like the future is here, and you can catch a glimpse of it from Salim.

The city of the big shoulders is also a city of firsts. From First Ladies, to beer brannigans, Chicago’s colorful history is filled with unique first-timers that have changed popular culture and even created some hair raising thought. Here are a few “firsts” to amaze your friends with:

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 1st First Lady elected to the U.S. Senate, was born in Chicago, though she now lives in and represents New York.

Speaking of the Clintons, Chicago is reported to be the city where the Twinkie was invented by Continental Baking Chicago Manager, James Dewar, though some reports suggest it was introduced for sales in Indianapolis. More than fifty years later, President Bill Clinton reportedly put one in The Millennium Time Capsule for future generations to enjoy.

The first planetarium, The Adler Planetarium in Chicago, was the first in the Western Hemisphere.

The University of Chicago became the site of the world’s first nuclear chain reaction.

Love it or hate it, fast food was born in the Chicago area. Ray Kroc first opened for business in Des Plaines on April 15, 1955. The first McDonald’s has been restored and now stands as The McDonald’s Museum.

The zipper, or clasp locker, as it was known, was invented in Chicago by Whitcomb Judson. Inventor of the sewing machine, Elias Howe, had earlier filed a patent for the zipper he invented, but failed to pursue it due to the success of the machine. Little did he know that forty-four years later, Judson would earn the title “Father of the Zipper.” It was later improved upon by Gideon Sundback who spent hours in 1917 grieving the death of his wife locked in his office working on a new design that is now known as the modern zipper.

There have been many since—of various origin—but the first beer riot occurred in Chicago in 1855 after Mayor Levi Boone (great-nephew of Daniel) proposed an ordinance which would close taverns on Sundays and raise the cost of a liquor license from $50 per year to $300 quarterly. German immigrants saw the move as targeting them and didn’t like it much. On April 21, after several tavern-owners were arrested for selling beer on Sunday, protesters clashed with police near the Cook County Court House. The next year the law was repealed and Boone was booted out of office.

Be a first of your own and be first in line for Web Content 2007, at Chicago’s USB Tower Conference Center, June 18 and 19.

If you are building or revising your web site in-house how do you really know how the work is getting done or what it’s costing you? Sure, you know what the initial investment is and the costs of IT salaries. You know the resources assigned. But do you know how the product performs over its lifetime: from design and development through launch? Or what kinds of financial and human resources it really uses up? Serena Software can help you answer those questions and manage any IT initiative better—over the entire life cycle. Serena is the leading provider of application lifecycle management (ALM) software and services for large enterprises. Their solutions and expertise have helped 96 of the Fortune 100 and 90 of the Global 100 capitalize on software development initiatives.

Serena does this through an entire suite of products and services that, not only manage applications, but projects and portfolios, too. And to enhance team synchronization, Serena software adds a centralized, automated point of collaboration that provides reliable/consistent information to stakeholders, managers, and team members.

Mariner –Provides portfolio, project, resource, demand, and financial management, enabling customers to focus resources and innovation strategically

Dimensions 10 –Integrates business requirements with change and configuration management through a single, unified process for faster, higher quality outcomes

Team Track–Synchronizes global application development teams and processes to drive higher quality results

You can even download trials of Serena’s applications. So you can try it before you buy it. Don’t you love that?!

Visit Serena’s information booth at Web Content 2007 and talk to them more about it—there’s too much to say here—or check our their web site for trials, whitepapers, and case studies. If you are managing any kind of software project, you might just need what Serena has.

When Open Source Makes Sense

Seth Gottlieb is a consultant you want to get to know. Why? Because he likes to save his clients money. One way he does this is by being open to Open Source. But make no mistake, he saves his clients money by also steering them away from open source software solutions if they aren’t the best products for their needs.

He’s highly involved in the open source community and has seen hundreds of open source content management systems. But open doesn’t just mean free. Open source is really a licensing model with a number of criteria that determine whether software complies to the open source standard. Seth can tell you what these are and what they mean to your organization when choosing a CMS.

That’s why his presentation topic for Web Content 2007 is called When Open Source Makes Sense. Seth has spent “a lot of time” working with open source software at several leading consultancies including Viant, Molecular, and The Advisory Board Company. He most recently founded and facilitated the content management practice at Optaros, and is the founder and principal of Content Here, his own consulting company, where he works with companies of all sizes, helping them improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their content management and publishing processes.

Seth has a regularly occurring podcast, The Malcontents that discusses content management trends and issues. He also speaks and writes extensively on content management issues, including two popular articles, Selecting a CMS, followed by a valuable how-to, How to Select a CMS.

See Seth Gottlieb’s presentation on Day One of Web Content 2007, part of the Content Development and Management track.

Al Capone is America’s best-known and most infamous gangster. He remains symbolic of the corruption and havoc wrought by Prohibition. He is also the quintessential all-American boy: born into obscurity, rising from nothing, and ascending to great heights through hard work, creativity, and sheer force of will.

Ironically, Chicago’s most famous bad guy was born in New York to Neapolitan immigrants on January 17, 1899. Though a bright kid, he dropped out of school at 14 and went to work as a bouncer and bartender. After insulting a female patron, he was cut by her brother earning his nickname Scarface.

About this time he joined the Five Points gang. Details of these years are sketchy, but Capone apparently carried out a few “hits” during these formative years, but was never convicted of anything more than disorderly conduct. Things did heat up after he hospitalized a rival gang member, so his boss Frankie Yale sent him to Chicago until things cooled off.

In Chicago Capone went to work for Yale’s old mentor John Torrio and learned his trade well: bootlegging, bookmaking, speakeasies, gaming, and brothels. An attempt was made on Torrio’s life by a rival gang, so Torrio took early retirement. Capone took over the rackets and proved he was even better at managing them than Torrio was. Business flourished.

Chicago’s crime scene was not without competition. The rival North Side gang was headed by Bugs Moran. Competition was tough, but Capone was tougher. The resulting St. Valentine’s Day Massacre , where Moran’s lieutenants were murdered was Capone’s work. Now Chicago had one boss.

Though Capone was ruthless, probably ordering scores of hits, he was also considered fair and generous. He was the first to open soup kitchens in the city after the crash of ’29. He gave food and clothing to the needy at his own expense. His underlings both liked and respected him.

Eventually he was convicted of income tax evasion and sent to prison. He did 7 years, and was considered a model prisoner. While in stir he became ill with syphilitic dementia and started to weaken. He spent much of his time in the infirmary. The last eight years of his life were spent in quiet retirement in Palm Island, Florida. He died January 24, 1947.

If you haven’t chosen a Web content management system yet, it can’t be for lack of information. A wealth of it exists to help you decide what is right for you and your organization. But just in case you haven’t started your homework, log on to crownpeak.com and browse the information center.

There you will find white papers on topics like Find and Control your Digital Assets, Web site Management Strategy, and Secrets to Managing a Successful CMS Deployment. You will also find case studies, Webinars, and cool tools like a Total Cost of Ownership Calulator, which lets you compare costs over three years of using a Web content management system based on your own organization’s figures. Use it to compare the total costs for open source, installed applications, and software service CMS. So you can find out what is really right for you.

CrownPeak provides its Web content management through Software as a Service (SaaS) via the web, so there are never any upgrade costs. In fact you never have to install anything or buy new hardware to support it. Why not? Because it can all be hosted from a Tier 1 data center, managed, and stored off-site using security features that most organizations could never afford on their own. Or if you want, CrownPeak can manage your content and publish to your site on your own servers.

Your costs are based on your needs, how large your site is and what kinds of site-related tools you want, such as email, hosted site search, and web analytics (just to name a few). So it’s perfect for organizations of any size, and has special features for non-profits and publishing.

When you engage with CrownPeak, you get dedicated account management, life-long active support, design and development, customization, and classroom training–of course. Basically, everything you want and need. Would they spend all that money on security just to leave you out in the cold?

Check out the things some of the most trusted voices in the industry are saying about CrownPeak. Then register to hear Robert Rose, VP Marketing and Product Strategy, at Web Content 2007. He is presenting on Software as a Service: Understanding Hosted Web Content Management Solutions, Day Two of the Tools and Technology track.