Gilbane Conference and LISA Forum San Francisco 2007

For the next three days we’re at the historic Palace Hotel in the heart of San Francisco participating in the Gilbane Conference and LISA Forum. The annual content management event is by far the best organized and most professional of all content events we’ve attended (and we’ve attended many!). This year’s west coast event is organized into five tracks: Content Management, Web Content Management (yes, there’s a BIG difference), Enterprise Search, Collaboration and Enterprise Blogs and Wikis, and Publishing Technologies. Each track has a variety of speakers offering presentations, workshops, panel discussions and demonstrations.

San Francisco View © Christopher Howey – FOTOLIA

Today, Gilbane offers an informative lineup of pre-conference tutorials:

• Web Content Management Systems: Architectures and Products (featuring Tony Byrne, Founder, CMSWatch
• Search: Navigating the Selection and Procurement Process (lead by Lynda Moulton, Lead Analyst, The Gilbane Group)
• Principles of Web Operations Management (with Lisa Welchman, President, Welchman Consulting)
• Taxonomy Development and Implementation (featuring Seth Earley, President, Earley & Associates)

Tomorrow, TheContentWrangler.com’s Scott Abel will lead the first session after the keynote, “The Multi-site, Multi-channel User Experience”, a panel discussion on the importance of the user experience and how changes in user expectations are impacting customer loyalty. The session will focus on the entire user experience, including navigation and content relevance on customer-facing websites.

Later this week (Friday), we’ll also be attending the Content Management Professionals Summit, “Managing Content Management Projects” (also at The Palace Hotel, San Francisco). More on this event later.

We’ll be blogging from the event again this year. We’re on the lookout for smart uses of content technology, success (and horror) stories, and emerging technologies and standards that may impact the way you create, manage and deliver information.