Open Publish 2007 - Baltimore, Day 1

It's been a while since I've posted. That's what happens during project crunch time.

I presented the Interoperability Framework that Scott Hudson and I have been developing at the Open Publish conference in Baltimore. This is the first time this conference has been offered in hte US (Allette Systems hosts this conference in Australia - need to find a way to get down under!).

It's a small, but very enthusiastic group of 50 or so attendees. About a dozen attended my presentation which was received with great interest. From my read of the audience, most haven't yet had to worry too much about leveraging content from different standards. Still, it led to great discussions afterward. I will be writing more about this topic later on!

In the first keynote, Michael Wash from the Government Printing Office presented how the GPO is changing to incorporate content-centric publishing, from a wide variety of sources. Very enlightening to learn about how the GPO is required to take content from any government agency in virtually any format including napkins!

In the second keynotes, Paul Jensen from Wolters-Kluwer provided some very interesting insight into the "state" of the Publishing Industry. It's often assumed that the entire publishing industry is diminishing. Yet Paul analyzed different segments within the industry and demonstrated that certain segments are certainly in trouble, like newspaper publishing. Still, other segments like professional publishing (legal, tax, etc.) are doing very well.

Ann Michael gave a presentation about an often unlooked aspect to implementing CMS solutions in an environment: the people! Who are the stakeholders? Who stands to win? Who stands to lose? How do we identify dissenters (skeptics, passive-aggressives, even us - the consultants!)? How do we identify and manage organizational/environmental changes like management turnover? Certainly, managing a CMS implementation project is no trivial task, managing the personalities and people must be integral part of the process!

Steve Manning from the Rockley Group presented how choosing the right CMS is often as challenging as planning to implement a CMS!





Bob DuCharme is slated to be speaking today. I'm looking forward to seeing his presentation.