Everything seems to have moved to what Julie called a “touch  first experience” supposedly meaning the whole interface is built for touchscreens. Whilst the innovation appears to be awesome, this is seismic shift in UI, and I shudder when considering the training requirement for MSFTs massive base of corporate denizens, not to mention Mums and Dads that feel right at home with a start button and associated menus on the bottom left of the screen. The trusty start button has been around since Windows 95. Will we happily adapt or be dragged kicking and screaming? It is a major handrail move, in fact if I were using the handrail analogy for this OS I would say it replaces the handrails with a levitation device. Could it lead to a hugely delayed migration as change managers grapple with the cost of changeover and Mums and Dads turn to Apple in frustration?

Innovation is awesome but the trick will be bringing us users along for the ride.

Here is the vid…

Our trip started with a midday Saturday flight to L.A on V Australia and commenced in the lovely suburb of Brentwood L.A. John’s youngest son, Gideon chauffeured us around L.A. and we spent the day mooching around the shops of Santa Monica and generally taking in the local vibe (and of course getting our phones and iPads wired for 3G).

After that we checked into the JW Marriot in downtown L.A for the start of the Gartner Conference. This area of L.A is home to the L.A Lakers and we arrived the Lakers game was about to start and everything was buzzing with conference attendees and game fans.

Our first order of work was to check the booth and set it up with brochures and of course our Koalas and boomerangs.

After setup we went to our first meeting with our fantastic East Coast distributor WebTeks. Here is a picture of Tom and John after our dinner meeting at a nearby steakhouse.

Tom attended the whole conference as our guest and was brilliant in providing us with local knowledge and assistance throughout the conference. He was also great at engaging leads and bringing them to the stand.

An interesting observation in the US is that the vocab is slightly different. People still use the term Portals a lot and I head the acronym B2E (Business to Employee) when referring to their Intranets. Additionally most people I spoke with had requirements with significant scale, billion dollar revenue, 1000’s of employees and offices across the US and the globe. There seemed to be an even mix of Government and Commercial entities and I would describe their domain knowledge as ranging between low to intermediate. There was also a similar trend to Australia in that many of the attendees were aligned with the Marketing function as opposed to IT.

Other attendees included Sitecore, Ektron, Google, Adobe Microsoft, Oracle and Jive. Here is a picture of all the sponsors. Of course our good mate from Ektron Tom Wentworth was once again standing at his booth directly opposite us.

A few more pics…

The audience flocked to our stand to find out more about this quirky Australian company and they definitely loved our little Koala. He was so popular that on day 2 we started a twitter campaign for the best elcom/koala tweet. The prize…a boomerang. There is one thing for sure with all the noise we made we will definitely if anything be remembered .

Generally our days started at around 6am with networking breakfasts then speaking sessions and then conference floor networking followed by networking drinks, networking dinners and eventually you crash after an exhausting day on these comfy beds.

There was also some additional excitement because Lada Gaga was performing next door. We met a nice gentleman at conference called Raj. Raj works as a System Architect for the US Federal Reserve. Raj had no idea who Lady Gaga was but he decided to buy a ticket. I think he still recovering from the experience, especially because according to him Lada Gaga declared that everyone remove their shirts and the audience proceeded to do so. In Raj’s words… “this was very different to my last concert …. Andreas Bocelli”.

On the last night we were invited to drinks at the roof top bar at the Grammy Awards Museum which was next door out hotel. We were treated to a museum tour and of course us Aussies were the last ones standing at the bar along with the Irish and Indians.

In summary this was a very successful event for Elcom. We met many large US businesses who were very impressed with our offering and got quality facetime with the Gartner analyts. It gave us huge brand equity and allowed us to capture over 100 qualified leads. This is no doubt going to make Joshua Anstey very very busy.

On that note….a quick shout out to Josh. Having had the opportunity to chat with Josh over the last few days I can see he is working tirelessly to grow the business in the US under trying circumstances. We are only hearing about his successes of which there have been many but cold calling is a tough game and busy Americans are not shy to tell you go take a jump. I can also see that being by himself and the difficulty of time zone makes it really trying. So from all of us here us Oz…keep shooting for the stars Josh, I think I speak for everyone when I say we’re all extremely excited about this phase of Elcom’s growth and want to do whatever we can to support you and make it a huge success.

It all started a few years back when consultants started speaking of her prowess and I dared navigate to the site to partake of her offerings. I was immediately hooked and returned with salespeople and prospective customers on numerous occasions to catch a glimpse of her high fidelity cut/paste which left bullets intact. Delighted by her functionality we proposed and she accepted, it was an OEM made in heaven.

Ok, I could go on but you’re probably puking right now so I’ll drop the narrative and get down to business.

Similar to many web professionals and most likely people reading this blog we’ve all had to put up with sub-par rich text editors or wysiwyg editors as they’ve become known. These are the tools that we’re told will make web publishing a breeze. Just like using Microsoft Word…uh…right…um….wrong!

Scratch the surface of most leading editors and you’ll find that a bullet <li> pasted from a word processor becomes a <p style=”margin-left: 20px” class=”bullet1”> etc… I kid you not; and how about when a simple paragraph becomes enmeshed inside an <h1> and despite repeated attempts you’re forced to drop into HTML to separate them. The reality is that despite all the awesome functionality the leading Web Content Management Systems provide, it is the publishers, the actual users whom spend 90% of their time writing, editing and publishing content which waste countless hours mucking around with editors and are driven to drink by WYSIWYG inconsistency and awkwardness. I won’t even begin to mention the poor web developers that are tasked with supporting them.

Now here’s the really good news….we’re putting the finishing touches on our integration with EditLive in the Elcom CMS and it will be available as a module in version 7.3, due for release in 3 weeks. In fact I’ve just completed a full test cycle and have come away truly impressed with its functionality and specifically the way it cleans and presents semantic HTML code even with cut/pastes from external sources, image cropping, track changes, commenting and accessibility checking as you type. Even advanced table management (for data of course) handling splits, resizes, merged cells, defining header rows vs data rows and table summaries for accessibility, and it never skips a beat while doing all this magic.

…but I know what you’re thinking……it’s a Java app and Elcom is Microsoft shop (heavens forbid). Well the .NET wrapper made integration really straightforward and whatsmore this cool kid has an outstanding javascript based fallback editor that automagically loads for clients that don’t support the java runtime.

So let me just say on my personal, unsponsored and somewhat passionate blog, that the EditLive rich text editor from Ephox is a godsend. As a further bonus it makes me very proud that it was built right here in Australia! So here’s to less grey hair and more accuracy when editing or pasting your web content.

Do you use EditLive? Got a fav editor? I’d love to hear about it, leave a comment…

Take a look and let me know your thoughts…

Ok so here is tip number one.

Windows Clock

Click your Windows clock so that you see this screen…

Click “Change date and time settings…” and then click “Additional Clocks"

You can set two additional time zones. So when you click the time again you will see your local time (Sydney) plus two additional time zones.

But wait…there’s more…

Outlook Calendar

If you use Outlook 2010 go to File > Options in backstage…

…choose the Calendar option and scroll down to timezones…

From here you can nominate a second time zone for your Outlook calendar. This will show a second time dimension alongside your local timezone. It’s very handy for scheduling meetings across timezones. I suspect we’re going to be using this a lot once our office opens in New York in January.

Lastly…who uses the Windows Sidebar or Google Sidebar (Gadgets)?…NOT ME!!

Well that was until I found a need for it. When travelling it actually provides quite useful time and weather information.

So with all this information you can now confidently go forth and export!

The keynote was packed with standing room only for latecomers, my guesstimate was approx 800 people in attendance. Unfortunately the keynote wasn’t exactly a Keynote but rather a panel session moderated by Frank Gilbane including: Marie Williams, Senior Director Web Innovation for Hilton Hotel Worldwide, Keith Cook, Global ebusiness officer, ACE group and Aaron Hill, Senior Director, Online Strategy and Services, SAS. This was a reasonably informative insight into the WCM needs of these organisations however it probably lacked the usual wow factor associated with conference keynotes. What is interesting is that the entire panel come under the marketing function not IT. This represent a shift in WCM away from IT and firmly into the hands of the business, so the focus was on strategy, funding, and process rather than technology.

Next up was the popular Industry Analyst Keynote Debate: What’s Real, What’s Hype, and What’s Coming?

Moderated by Frank Gilbane with Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, IDC, Stephen Powers Senior Analyst with Forrestor, Scott Liewehr Senior Consultant, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group, Tony Byrne, The Real Story Group / CMS Watch and last but not least Kathleen Reidy, Senior Analyst, 451 Group.

This was an interesting and lively debate. As is common in most conference nowadays there was a fair bit of negativity levelled at SharePoint, the following question from the audience highlighted this…

which new features make SharePoint less sucky?

The Response from Tony Byrne of Real Story Group…

a lot of people like the ribbon

Tony has the opinion that SharePoint has become too big and MSFT can’t add many more features because of regression testing hurdle. Another interesting comment from the audience suggested that there had been a seismic shift in user platform to mobile which will lead to a dramatic shift in content mgmt. This ultimately poses a big threat to the dominance of SharePoint which is so popular because it is an MS Office/platform play.

The afternoon sessions were also great and I’ll blog more about them in due course…

The schwag is a bit lacking but this has been made up for by the steady and high quality people, presentations, not to mention a steady supply of drink and food served throughout the conference.

Had a great dinner tonight with the Ephox folk and ready and raring to go for Day 2. Until then…

Today I was meant to be in Chesapeake, Virginia. I woke up early, grabbed a coffee, jumped in a cab bound for La Guardia Airport in New York. I checked in, went through security and got on a DASH-8 a.k.a bus with wings. Well the bus broke down. First the engine sputtered badly and made a funny noise. The Cpt told us he was heading back to the terminal and then a tire blew, so we were towed to the terminal. We didn’t get very far.

So they tried to find another plane then attempted to reroute us but the only available option was a 5pm flight i.e. after the scheduled meeting. The lady sitting next to me said “I humped it outta my sick bed for this” to which I replied “I flew 10000km from Australia” to which she replied “you trump me!”

The only option was to fly to Boston for the Gilbane conference and hopefully reschedule the Chesapeake visit to later in the week.

Boston, Boston, Boston. You quiet little city sitting just above New York. Why did you never mention that you were so pretty, so charming, so laid back, so smart. Seems a bit like Melbourne actually, but without the complex. I was welcomed by enchanting tree lined streets with amazing shops, food and friendly people.

I won’t be doing much site seeing though. Over the next two days I will learning and absorbing everything the Gilbane Content and Collaboration conference can throw at me. Here is a selection of some of the interesting talks I’ll be attending…

• Current & Future State of Content Management Systems
• Development from the Trenches: How Developers Shape Content and Interactivity for Today’s Devices
• Next Thing You Know… You’re Global!
• Rethinking Content Management Systems
• 2011 – the Year of Semantic Search
• Social Publishing in Practice
• Game Changing Content Technologies
• Putting it into Action – Moulding the Customer Experience
• Case Studies: Building & Buying

Should be really interesting. I’ll be live tweeting using the #gilbane hashtag…stay tuned.

Each day I left the hotel to get a quick coffee and breakfast and returned late at night, exhausted from doing….well…I’m not exactly sure. It was all just a blur…it started at a diner with a bottomless cup of cwoffee then found myself at Rockerfeller Plaza exploring (I love 30 rock and looked everywhere for Liz Lemon) then stumbled onto the Apple store (a geek must always pay his respects), the FAO Schwartz (a mandatory stop if you have kids) and then bam there is Central Park in all it’s wintery glory….walking…more walking…Gap, Banana Republic, Diesel (btw, us Aussies are being massively ripped off in Australia. Everything here is so cheap even when discounting the current exchange rate.)

I then went downtown and was moved to tears by the stories of people impacted by the Sept 11 tragedy. Guides whom have been personally affected by the events that transpired take tours to show what happened. I wasn’t expecting this and was blown away by the power, enormity and tragedy of the event as if it happened yesterday. Our guide is truely remarkable lady.

I then met with a couple of New Yorkers whom still find it hard to venture near the site.

Today was not as hectic but still flew past and I felt I didn’t really do much. I caught a ferry and saw some great views of the city and now suddenly the weekend is over.

I’m off to Chesapeake tomorrow to visit an I.T company and hope to blog more about it soon. Bye for now.
 

(An hour later) Found wireless in the strangest of places…mid flight on the Virgin America flight. How cool is that! I’ve been so very impressed with Virgin and V Australia. Flight from Sydney was brilliant, inflight entertainment systems have come a long way. I have over 100 movies, tv shows etc to choose from.

On my way to New York now and will be visiting a distributer in Virginia, attending the Gilbane Content and Collaboration conference in Boston and spending some time with a client in Toronto. I’m looking forward to connecting with everyone and seeking out new partnerships as a precursor to the official opening of the New York Elcom office in January 2011.

If I can find wireless I’ll be posting and tweeting daily to keep everyone back home in touch with the trip. Thanks to everyone for lending me the super warm jackets but so far it’s been pretty mild. LA was 12 degrees and sunny. NY will be colder. Until then, bye for now.