Nice wrap up of the Gilbane Conference
Charlie Wood has a nice summary of the Spring 2006 Gilbane Conference in San Francisco. I was at the conference too and I am sorry that I didn't get to meet Charlie because I really like his blog. One thing that Charlie described that I definitely felt this year was the sea change away from ECM as a monolithic solution and toward a model of inter-connected task specific content applications. I couldn't agree more. This is my fourth Gilbane conference and the trend has been remarkable. Back in November 2004, I noted how the analysts were decidedly split on whether anyone was delivering on the one size fits all ECM vision. Then in Fall 2005, there were fewer people willing to stand by the monolithic ECM vision. This year, I heard several people say that people had over-bought content management solutions and were having difficulty adopting them due to complexity and poor usability. This year, there was much more emphasis on lighter weight, targeted, viral technologies such as blogs and wikis that are actually doing what the big software vendors have been failing to do: enable communication and collaboration with as little impedance as possible.