Presenting at cmf2006 in Aarhus Denmark

Well, I am on the plane starting to type this entry. My wife and I are flying home (Washington DC area) from a 10 day euro trip. You can take a look at some pictures on my flickr account. We went to Paris, Arhus, and Copenhagen each for a few days. We had a lot of fun. We decided to take this trip for two reasons, first, and most important, this was a gift to us from us (TUFU?) for our 10 year anniversary. Secondly, was to a present and attended the cmf2006 conference. Although, Dianna didn’t attend the conference she was able to go out and see lots and Aarhus and she was able to come to some of the conference social events. We both had a great time at these events. The persons (notice this is agnostic to the category of conference attendee type; vendor, attendee, or presenter) at the event were all GREAT. I can’t think of a better time I’ve had at a conference as I feel like I actually got to meet people and not just conference attendees.

I presented a split session with Dr. Thomas Vogel. He presented on his company’s multi year application roll out (not really a project but more a program of many parallel on-going tasks) called a portal. I thought it was a great topic and he shared some real insight to how to sustain and grow this type of enterprise application in the large companies.

My presentation went well. I got some good questions afterwards and not so surprisingly I had some rather in-depth conversation on the topic during the many networking and social events.

I attended rather enjoyed Jim Hobart’s tutorial on designing web 2.0 applications. Luckily it wasn’t a worship service with Ajax being the master of all but more trying to remind us that web applications have users and users get frustrated with poor interfaces and that frustrated users are inefficient. He explained at a 10000 foot view that there are now better development tools for developers to build more usable sites. I felt the focus of the talk really evolved around trying to design a better user interface, testing the design with real users, and all to make business more efficient. Why do you test your usable designs with real users? The answer given to us is so that you make the business process more efficient. I can’t think of any better answer; Can you?

Aarhus is a nice quaint city (“probably the biggest little city in the world” is what I was told) and everyone we ran into in the city was very friendly. The conference was organized well with lots of time to actually meet others and lots of time to attend many insightful presentations. Anyone that struggles with their content management that are in the area (i.e. the globe) and are able to attend next year should seriously consider attending cmf2007.