I presented at the Gilbane San Francisco show last week (my presentation on enterprise search tuning, with voiceover is available here).
It was an interesting experience. Here are some of my observations about the learning sessions and the conference itself (in no particular order).
The Google keynote address on the first day was illuminating. I’ll blog more about this tomorrow, but we learned information that I’ve not seen Google disclose previously. More on this tomorrow.
The vendor floor was full, and most of the CMS booths were indistinguishable. It’s clear the marketing message for all vendors has coalesced around a core set of CMS attributes. This lack of differentiation means that life for purchasers of a CMS is only going to become more difficult .
The analysts universally agreed that customers should “try before they buy” when it comes to content management solutions, and they encouraged customers to walk away from any vendor that wouldn’t cooperate. This sounds like a fine idea. In practice, we’ve found that few customers have the time/bandwidth/motivation to learn to use multiple CMS products and undertake real-world evaluations. Perhaps this “date before you get married” motto promoted by the analysts will catch on, but I rather suspect it won’t.
The conference was filled with questions about Enterprise 2.0 and the role of web content management platforms. Answers were in much shorter supply.
Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 was the white elephant in the room. No one – neither vendors nor analysts – spent significant time talking about the ground shaking impact Sharepoint is having on the CMS marketplace. The closest they came was when Forrester Research analyst Rob Koplowitz first described MOSS as a set of festering boils and then shifted gears and suggested MOSS is fundamentally changing the way businesses get work done.
Three comments worth noting (and I’m paraphrasing here):
- Tony Byrne of CMSWatch:
Most enterprise 2.0 success stories we are hearing about involve huge companies that benefit from the network effect, or knowledge-intensive organizations where knowledge is the key asset. - Cairo Walker of Step Two:
Technology can only support what is already happening (the implication being that technology can’t change how you work, just support how you work). - Rachel Happe of IDC:
Content is exploding – we’ll see a six-fold increase in content volume between 2006 and 2010. And 70% of this content will be user-generated.
Finally, participants, vendors and analysts all commented on the weirdness of having Gilbane SF and WebContent 2008 happening at the same time. What? There aren’t 52 weeks in a year? The overlap meant that both attendees and speakers were diluted. I’d have very much liked to hear Lisa Welchman’s keynote on Web 2.0 and Web Operations at WebContent 2008.