[australia] Notes from Sydney Meeting - May 11

[David Warwick]

Hi all,

Our last Sydney meeting was held on May 11 and was attended by around 15 of
our list members including some overseas visitors. James and I also bumped
into may of you during CeBIT at Darling Harbour which was on during the same
week. I have covered a number of items below that may be of interest to list
members ...

The next meetings are ...
MELBOURNE | June 5
SYDNEY | July 27

Please see 
http://www.cmprofessionals.org/organization/communities/australia/ for
details.

Please also continue to invite others to join the mailing list at
http://lists.cmsml.org/mailman/listinfo/australia or by circulating this
email outside of our list.

I have also noticed more of our members using LinkedIn, see
http://www.linkedin.com/ and suggest that you may also find it useful (free
networking and contact service ­ popular in IT and consulting circles).

I have included notes from the Sydney meeting below, including transcription
of the whiteboard slides thankfully completed by James Robertson who
moderated the discussion on Getting the right content: workflow, authoring
models, and more.

Our next meeting in Sydney coincides with the Open Publish conference. Last
year was a great event and well worth attending, see
http://www.openpublish.com.au/ at this stage the suggested topic for our
meeting is Content Management Workflow (a much more involved topic than it
may appear on the surface) and with some luck Samantha and Julien from Merck
may be able to tell us what workflow means for a multinational
pharmaceutical company, James can tell us why workflow doesn¹t work and the
rest of us can fill in the middle ;-)

CM Professionals Australia Community (to which in future, for simplicity, I
intend to refer to as CMPAC) is also intending to run a brief (2-3 hour)
mini-conference later in the year in both Sydney and Melbourne. The idea
being to bring us together, cover as many CM issues as possible and
encourage others to become involved in CMPAC. If you would like to talk
(either individually for around 10 minutes, or on a panel), please send me
an email with a description of the topics to which you feel you would add
value and colour to a discussion. In in doubt, please volunteer ­ we are all
interested in what everyone has to add to discussion in this field. (email
david at komodocms.com or phone 0411 411 555).

Please also take a moment to look over the content from the meeting
whiteboard (below) prepared by James.

Thanks and regards (hope to meet you at a future CMPAC meeting and/or Open
Publish ­ or online at LinkedIn).

Cheers,

David Warwick
Co-Chair
CMPAC



What are the challenges in creating good content?
-------------------------------------------------

* Need professional writers
* What does it mean in practice?
* Consistency
* "Consumption is invisible"
* Must be maintained
* Happy talk
* Temporal issues (content dates!)
* Content may only last a day!
* People must be trained to write for the web
* Need to realise it's needed and read
* Recognising the value
* Historically, published by other means
* Cultural change
* Not all content is equal
* Different to print
* Approval, workflow
* Editing
* Audit trails
* Decentralised?
* "Bucks per tag"
* Rest of content/info out there
* Line between communications and IT?
* Role of IT in content today?
* Need for executive champion?
* Align with revenue/profit
* Content processes add more overhead than value of content
* Does good content connect you to people?

Role of technology in creating good content?
--------------------------------------------

* Reduce the _cost_ of delivering content
* Automating
* Storing
* Tracking
* Publishing to multiple points
* Smart reporting, analytics
* Replacing ink & paper
* Displace costs
* Real usage known
* Managing repetition:
   - compliance
   - consistency
   - style/guidelines
   - templates
* Redundancy check (CRC check by system)
* Audit trail
* Risk mitigation
* Helps to demonstrate value

Centralised vs decentralised
----------------------------

Centralised:
* Consistency (sort of)
* Enhances user experience
* More relevant
* Takes too long
* Can be more disengaged from use?
* Ownership of site, not content
* Just final edits?
* Overall perspective
* Web strategy

Decentralised:
* Greater spread of output
* Disparate
* Subject matter expertise
* More relevant
* Harder to control
* Immediacy
* No clue about web audience?
* Inconsistency
* More authors
* Content ownership

Hot topics
----------

* Workflow
* Transition into a CMS
* Governance
* Reuse
* Accessibility
* Data mining
* Personalisation
* Integration
* WCM vs CM

---

Cheers,
James
-------------------------
James Robertson, Managing Director
Step Two Designs

Email: jamesr at steptwo.com.au
Web: www.steptwo.com.au
Phone: +61 2 9319 7901
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.cmsml.org/pipermail/australia/attachments/20060521/39b34ad7/attachment.html