Technology / technology decisions

Workshop C. Insiders' Guide to Selecting the Right WCM

If you are a website or intranet manager or architect, this year may well find you looking to implement new tools or refresh dated platforms. However, you face a wide and growing array of vendors willing to address your problems. Which ones offer the best fit for your particular circumstances?

This fast-paced workshop led by Real Story Group founder Tony Byrne will help you understand the broad but converging marketplaces for Web CMS technologies. Tony will sort out the key players and business models, and offer you a roadmap for deciding which types of technologies and vendors provide the best long-term fit for your needs. The workshop will answer several key questions:

• How can you quickly distinguish among the 120 major toolsets across these marketplaces?
• How are changes in the open source landscape impacting your options today and going forward?
• Where does Web Publishing intersect with emergent technologies?
• What should you expect to pay for these tools?
• What are the critical, can't-ignore architectural distinctions you need to make?
• How mature are the vendors? - What are the strengths and weaknesses of some key players, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle
• How can you insure that your selection process meets your original business objectives?
• Which should you pick first: Agency, Integrator, Vendor, or...?
• What are some major pitfalls others have made that you can readily avoid?
• How are these marketplaces likely to evolve in the coming years, and how can you best align your firm to take advantage of future innovation?

T1. Mobile App Development and Management

With mobile already outpacing desktop traffic it's time align product and development strategies and efforts accordingly, if you haven't already. This means way more than tacking on an app and checking off the mobile to-do item. In this session our speakers share scads of info on app design, development, and management that are relevant for both enterprise and consumer apps. The session is intended for both business and technical managers.

P2. Aligning Technology with Strategy - Harvard Business Review

The Harvard Business Review Group launched a redesigned site in November 2014, a big step forward for the company in terms of both strategy and technology. The team adopted new technologies for the both the front end and back end that were not only designed to push our capabilities forward, but chosen in close collaboration with business stakeholders with a deep understanding of where our business is heading. HBR's goals are similar to any other magazine/publishing/media company, to grow the business by creating and retaining subscribers and simultaneously meet the changing needs of digital advertising as print revenues potentially decline. As the primary place where more and more people and clients engage with us, HBR.org has become the center of our strategy. The old site served us well for years but our new technology choices now allow us to form the direct relationships not only with our audience, but more importantly with each subscriber. Topics we'll cover in our talk will include: advantages of modern UI frameworks and why we built our own, migrating from traditional relational databases to a big data/nosql database.

The presentation will consist of at least three parts: setting the stage for change, evaluating options for new technologies to meet the need, choices made with a retrospective on lessons learned.

T5. When and How to Move to a New CMS / Digital Platform

Replacing a content management system has always been a daunting task, but is now more difficult than it ever. As CMS's have matured they have taken on more functionality, much of which overlaps with other systems thus forcing choices about which system should be responsible for which function. The marketing technology landscape and the variety of technology stacks it suggests are possible is scary indeed -- even though your own existing environment provides some constraints. The speakers in this session are consultants who have been through this with many clients and have some great advice to share.

T7. Modern Multichannel Strategies

Implementing COPE (Create Once Publish Everywhere) is not easy, but for years organizations have built systems to accomplish or approximate multichannel publishing. Is this still the best approach? Or is there a newer model needed to support the more interactive web and mobile experiences? This session includes lessons-learned from COPE implementations as well as a proposal for an enhanced model of COPE for a modern customer experience.

T9. Visualization Techniques for Text and Data

This session includes two very practical how-to presentations. Our first speaker looks at text analysis visualization, which has unique challenges, looks at software tools and analyzes the various ways to plot text analysis results for different applications. Our next speaker is both a comedian and a marketing consultant that specializes in creating infographics that are as "sharp and tight as jokes and stories". He will explain how and analyze some examples infographics using different presentation formats.