C3 Associates

Hello from sunny Orlando, Florida. Although the sun it out the temperature is not cooperating, with highs in the low 20’s (that’s about 70 Farenheit for my American friends) which is downright cold for this part of the world.

The keynote address at the opening dinner was by symphony conductor Boris Brott. He gave an interesting talk comparing the way a symphony works together to the way an organization can get into synch enabled by technologies like ECM. If everyone goes their own way it’s chaos, but if everyone works together they can make beautiful music.

The conference itself is interesting for the shift in focus from past years. This year it’s all about Web 2.0. The basic premise is that content enables Web 2.0, but that in a corporate context this content has to be secured and managed throughout its lifecycle. Open Text is developing a series of new tools to enable Web 2.0 in the enterprise including an enhanced Communities module, digital media management and support for mobile devices like iPhones and BlackBerries.

This strategy is not surprising, really. Open Text has to respond to customer requests for Web 2.0-type functionality within the enterprise and they are clearly trying to do that while at the same time trying to stay current with emerging technical and social trends. For customers that are committed to the Open Text stack this approach makes a lot of sense. At the same time, it’s a bit of a confused strategy given the close alignment between Open Text and Microsoft. Support for SharePoint as a front-end social collaboration platform in line with Open Text’s back end repository closely mirrors the direction Open Text outlined today. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, it just adds a bit of complexity into the mix for organizations that have both applications.

The other interesting news is the announcement of the Open Text Developers Network (http://otdn.opentext.com). In my mind anything that can help the development community succeed with Open Text products is a good thing.

I’ll add more tomorrow after John and I attend the detailed roadmapping sessions.

And if you get that obscure reference, you’ve clearly got a four year old at home. Find out more about Harry and his crazy adventures with a bucket full of dinosaurs here.

My colleague John Meilleur and I are looking forward to our own crazy adventures this week down in Orlando at the Open Text Content World conference. We’ll be posting daily summaries of what we learn so check back for updates. John will focus on the ECM for Microsoft track, I’ll be attending the Content Lifecycle Management track and we may even sneak into some sessions from other tracks. We might even find time for a nap. Can’t wait.

I’m back from Vancouver and my presentation to Project World. It was a good event and well-attended by people from throughout Western Canada and the Pacific North West.

My presentation stimulated a lot of interesting discussion (well, interesting if you’re a PM or ECM enthusiast). Here’s a link to the presentation. Questions or comments are welcome.