Program by Track

Selecting a CMS vendor in today’s landscape can be an overwhelming task. Many vendors, old and new, are more than willing to show you their wares through online flash demos, brochures and web sites. All of them seem to have great features and functionality. Understanding your company’s requirements is paramount before any vendor selection should be considered. Failure to develop an integrated plan that accounts for an organization’s business, stakeholder and user requirements can ensure failure.

When choosing a CMS or any software product, functional user and stakeholder requirements must be clearly defined. A structured methodology needs to be invoked to not only ensure that the proper vendor is chosen, but that the product has a productive lifespan.

Prescient Digital Media VP, General Manager, Carmine Porco, will outline the necessary steps in the selection process. This includes:

• How to identify your requirements
• Functional capabilities
• Timeline and governance for the CMS

Participants will be taken through a jargon-free lesson on how execution of this stage is vital and can be done with relatively little energy and cost.

Attendees will learn:

• The value of planning ahead
• Interviewing users/stakeholders
• Creating and scoring requirements
• Meeting potential vendors

As with any new technology, an organization must understand its needs before deciding on a solution. This is even more important in the CMS field, what with all the new vendors and amalgamation of solutions there are today.

Individuals in all levels of an organization can benefit from participation. This session is geared towards a wide ranging audience including those well versed in CMS functionality and offerings, to those with little or no CMS knowledge or background. From CEO’s to IT staff, to content developers, to communications coordinators, to interested individuals, this session will be an extremely informative and valuable experience.

Participants are sure to come away from the session with not only a firm understanding of the necessary steps in the CMS selection process, but also the associated opportunities for cost savings and ROI potential.

Wikis are a popular tool in the technical community for collaborating in the development of web content. A wiki makes it easy for anyone to edit and create content. They have historically lacked many of the important features of content management systems such as workflow.

The next wave of wiki products are targeting some of the storage mechanisms used by content management systems, such as the Java Content Repository.  This provides opportunities in blended tools, enabling combined tools, and the integration of wiki and CMS systems. 

In this interactive workshop we will be working the opportunities and challenges presented by the new generation of Wikis and content management systems.  After some brief background on Wikis and the open standards that new wikis are being built around, we will be focusing on what this means for Content Management professionals, and how we can take advantage of the strengths of wikis in our systems. We will be focusing on how to best leverage the strengths of wikis for our content, and how they can form a part of our content authoring environment.

Drupal recently became a winner of CNet’s Webware 100 award in the publishing category. Drupal is a Free and Open Source Web Content Management software and a web application framework.  It is highly used and has been included in the Google Summer of Code (SoC) project. The Google SoC reference’s Drupal as being the poster child for Web 2.0 community driven web site software.  I will describe and demonstrate some of the major features of the software as well as some of the limitations. Some specific features we’ll look at are the Content Construction Kit, Views, Taxonomy, and some Content Management functions.

Drupal adheres to some good content management practices. During the discussion we will look and modify some configuration areas for the more technical savvy as well as look at the content managers and content authors interfaces. Although, a computer isn’t required if you bring you laptop you will be able to log on to the site and manage content.

WCM is back, but now it’s multi-channel WCM.  Multi-channel requirements add both new success factors, as well as hazards that must be understood and overcome.  In this workshop, led by Percussion Software CTO Vern Imrich, you will learn how to identify and address these factors.

The workshop will begin with an analysis of several field examples, the success and failures in each, and the decisions made that led to them. These lessons will then be further explored in specific topical focus areas, such as the following:

• Usability—content authors in CMS environments have rapidly adopted “in context” editing to improve user adoption. But in a multi-channel system, do authors work in the context of a channel, many channels or in some new neutral channel environment?
• Content Reuse—where is “single sourcing” critical and where does it break down due to form factor, media type and creative concerns? And when single sourcing is limited, what can be done to maintain consistency and reduce workloads?
• Business Process and Lifecycle—simple concepts like “approved” or “expired” take on new meaning in a multi-channel world. Approved for one channel or for all?  What kinds of process automation and lifecycle management can be used to address these changes?
• Modeling and Template Design—decomposing Web pages into content components and templates can be tricky even for a single Web site. Can one model really be defined when this decomposition must apply to all the multiple channels that may be involved? And what happens when the inevitable new devices and channels hit the market?  How can a solid foundation be established that isn’t already obsolete by the time the system goes live?
• Overall Architecture—we all know about separation of content from format (presentation). But what about separation of channel presentation logic from customer experience logic? How do you ensure a consistent customer experience regardless of the channel they use?

In each of these areas, the focus will be to identify the key questions you need to ask, the pros and cons of the decisions you make, and the risk factors that are incurred. This is a “roll up your sleeves” workshop with extensive audience participation expected throughout, so come with your own questions, examples and concerns.

The REALTOR.org content staff of 5 keeps the site up-to-date, leads the content efforts involved in redesigning site sections or the site’s representation of association programs, and serves as internal consultants for the rest of the association staff for all Web site issues.

• What can/should be automated with our CMS and what can’t/shouldn’t?
• What kinds of cultural changes are needed, and how do we go about making them?
• How to ensure that rules are applied effectively?
• How should we integrate content from various sources and various departments?
• When does a blog/podcast/audio/video make sense, and when does it not?

We have been successful from the beginning with some of our efforts and with others have had to revise our processes – or our expectations. We’ve learned from both these types of outcomes, and would like to share our learnings with others. Consolidating our content and applications from multiple platforms to one has helped us know what we know, solidify our approach and presentation, and evolve our standards to meet visitors’ expectations from the association.

Plone is a flexible open source content management system that is being used by Motorola, Nokia, NASA, Disney, HP, eBay and the Free Software Foundation. PloneMultimedia is a suite of add-on Plone components which make it easy to publish audio/video files and generate podcast feeds.

This talk will demonstrate some of the unique features of PloneMultimedia and discuss case studies where Plone is successfully being used in an artist community to share music and video files.

When a user uploads an audio/video file to the Plone-based website, the metadata (album, artist, producer, etc.) is automatically extracted from the file. Not only does this save the user from tedious data entry, but this metadata is also indexed using Plone’s powerful search tool, so the content is readily searchable.

Plone has the concept of Smart Folders - saved searches that return a list of content based on criteria the site admin specifies. This makes it very easy for non-technical users to generate lists of multimedia content (i.e. all MP3s with genre ‘jazz’).

Using Plone’s built-in workflow engine, the multimedia content can be submitted for review, and approved by a moderator. This ensures that inappropriate user-generated content can be rejected instead of being inadvertently published.

Plone also has many collaborative features which help to foster participation and online community. Users can submit their own multimedia content and comment, rate and tag other users’ content.

Attend this session to learn more!