Free Software Linux

Gilbane has released a report that any organization catering to the global community needs to have a look at. It's entitled Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Companies Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain -- don't be swayed by the less-than-captivating and very long title. It's chock full of qualitative research on how global businesses are creating, managing and publishing multilingual content. The short answer is that they're not.

The very last panel I attended at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco was also one that I had the privilege of moderating. Our topic was the big hot topic of the conference: how to integrate social networking features into the enterprise and whether or not they can co-exist happily with a content management system. Specifically in our panel's case, we talked about Facebook's utility. The net takeaway from our panel was -- it's all about the platform; Facebook matters because of its ability to integrate outside applications.

After navigating the murky lands of translation and globalizing content, I attended a panel at Gilbane that was a detailed look at XML and its importance in content management. The overall message I left with at the end was that XML was "tremendous technology" and as one panelist put it, "the most important integration tool in software today".

Yesterday I attended a panel on everyone's favorite topic: how to bring Social Computing concepts into the enterprise moderated by Geoffrey Bock, a lead analyst for the Gilbane Group. Panelists included Ross Mayfield, Founder, SocialText; David Hersh, CEO, Jive Software, Ed Cuoco, Co-founder, Spathe and Rusty Williams, SVP Product Planning, Mzinga.

Next up on our coverage of the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco was the "mini keynote" for the "Web Content Management" track which was a panel discussion with some big names in the WCM space, moderated by Tony White, a Lead Analyst for the Gilbane Group. The panelists present were Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO of FatWire; Erik Aeyelts Averink, of SDL Tridion; Bjarne Hansen, President, Sitecore USA; David Graham, CIO, Vignette and Jim Howard, CEO of CrownPeak. The first round of the panel consisted of each panelist discussing what they thought were the most pressing issues when picking a potential Web CMS provider.

The Gilbane Group has delivered a new report on the use of Social Media in the Enterprise. The report, called Collaboration and Social Media 2008- Taking Stock of Today's Experiences and Tomorrow's Opportunities includes a survey of medium and large American organizations, case studies and a vendor catalog. What we learn from reading the report is that social media applications are slowly supplementing the existing collaboration technologies -- email, websites and shared workspaces -- within organizations today and that vertical social media solutions are emerging to help them work smarter.