Sunday 9 December 2007

Online Information 2007 - Updated

So, its taken my all week to get round to posting, but wednesday and thursday I attended Online Information 2007 at Olympia in London. I would have liked to have been there on tuesday for Jimmy Wales packed out Keynote, but had some thing important to do at work :-(

However tuesdays Intranet strand was very interesting, with David Gurteen starting off with 'KM 2.0' and how the social networking tools are going to bring 'real' KM this time around. Look for his video's on "what is knowledge management" by searching under that term on YouTube and Google Video. David has put his slide up on Slideshare.net for us.

Next up was Sam Marshall of Clearbox Consulting. Sam addressed the potential enterprise audiences, categorising them as, 'advocates', 'cautioners' or 'Sceptics'. Sam side he would put his slides up by I don't see them yet (hint hint) but I liked his summary point: "Intranet 2.0 is about getting niche information to niche consumers" {of that information}.
UPDATE: Sam left a comment below with a link to his slides:
http://www.clearboxconsulting.co.uk/Intranets_and_Web_2_0_Sam_Marshall_v1_0.pdf

Helen Day on behalf of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum and Mark Morrell of BT did a good double act, with Helen presenting on generic findings from IBF studies, and Mark giving specifics on how the technologies are used at BT. Interestingly BT have gone for RSS big style and they are also one of the organisations to have a Wikipedia style online corporate encylopedia. They have 600 authorative articles in the system, so we are right back to David and social KM.......

On wednesday it was enterprise search before taking part in an a panel discussion on Open Source CMS. Boy, did I feel unworthy when compared to the luminaries sat beside me ! The panel was chaired by Theresa Regli of CMS Watch, who set us up with some excellent thought provoking questions. She was followed by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum, and founder of Alfresco. John is always an entertaining presenter and he touched on the fact that UK Government just does not seem to get Open Source (especially compared to other EU countries). Next up was Alex of Alkacon in Germany, the founder of OpenCMS. So why was I there, well the OU is the biggest user in the world of the Moodle open source Virtual Learning Environment (and I believe also currently the biggest Moodle development house !) so we know a thing or two about open source, and of course we used a 'mixed' environment, with closed source software too (we use the first of Mr Newtons products, not the latest.....).

The panel was fun, with some excellent questions from the floor and thus some interesting discussion. Of course no one would go for Theresa's deliberately provocative suggestion that open source CMS would replace proprietary CMS completely and entirely. But John reckons it will be a close thing within ten years, whilst Alex would contend that in the WCMS space, open source will take over as the majority of installations much sooner.

2 comments:

Sam Marshall said...

Hint taken Jed! The slides on Web 2.0 and Intranets are available at ClearBox Publications

JedPC said...

Thanks Sam, much appreciated !