SEO, CMS and the Gilbane Boston Show

I had the good fortune to present at the Gilbane Boston: Content, Collaboration, Customers on December 3rd on the intersection of search engine optimization and web content management. (I’ve embedded my slides below our whitepaper on embedding SEO best practices during CMS is also available).

The show is always a useful bell-weather for the enterprise content management industry writ large.  A few observations:

1. Many more of the attendees played a business or marketing roles than has been true in the past.  This continues a trend evident in the last few Gilbane shows – the balance has shifted from IT folks to those owning responsibilities for business outcomes.  My suspicion is that this reflects a broader change in how organizations view content management infrastructure – it’s now about delivering business results, not technical elegance.
2. Lots of people attended – and lots of vendors participated.  This has been a terrible year for hotels that are home to conferences.  (Rumour has it that Gilbane Boston was the first show of the year at the Westin Copley that sold out.)   The number of people attending – and the number of CMS vendors investing in sponsorship – suggests that enterprise content management will continue to thwart the worst of the recessionary winds.
3. Open source emerges as a viable contender in the minds of attendees.  There have always been advocates for open source platforms at Gilbane shows.  But I can’t recall a previous year when so many attendees indicated they were considering – or using – open source software.  I suspect the recession has forced firms to consider “free” open source software that might under other circumstances been more comfortable purchasing licences.  But many attendees indicated they were running both commercial software and open source projects – which suggests to me a new level of penetration for open source software. (Research summarized at Gilbane by 451 suggests similar conclusions)

During the second week of December, Microsoft & NLC hosted series of seminars in Calgary, Regina & Edmonton on the importance of Enterprise Search within all organizations. In total, over 70 people attended these seminars to better understand how they could make search a priority within their business. With the exploding volume of diverse content in today’s workplace, employees are finding it increasingly difficult to locate the information they need to do their job effectively.