If you’d require some assistance with your Web 2.0 initiatives and are considering Drupal please contact me.

Here is the session details:

Drupal recently became a winner of CNet’s Webware 100 award in the publishing category. Drupal is a Free and Open Source Web Content Management software and a web application framework. It is highly used and has been included in the Google Summer of Code (SoC) project. The Google SoC reference’s Drupal as being the poster child for Web 2.0 community driven web site software. I will describe and demonstrate some of the major features of the software as well as some of the limitations. Some specific features we’ll look at are the Content Construction Kit, Views, Taxonomy, and some Content Management functions.

Drupal adheres to some good content management practices. During the discussion we will look and modify some configuration areas for the more technical savvy as well as look at the content managers and content authors interfaces. Although, a computer isn’t required if you bring you laptop you will be able to log on to the site and manage content.

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We went from content silos to content management silos to enterprise silos. But by necessity, our need to share information is pushing us to collaborate beyond any arbitrary boundaries. What does this mean for our profession? By going to content management systems, are we just catching up with today, or preparing for tomorrow? Will Content 2.0 catch up to Web 2.0? Strategy A is bringing the first content management conference to Vancouver that covers content management from both the Web and XML structured authoring perspectives.

Looks like it could be an interesting conference. Check out more details at confabb.

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.