I spent the entire second day at KM World in the Content Management track (except for a quick jump over to “Intranets” to see my colleague present on Document Management Usability at Southwest Airlines).

My three favorite sessions of the day were:

Tony Byrne, “Making Sense of the CMS Vendor Landscape”. I’ve followed Tony’s blog for a while but hadn’t heard him speak until Wednesday. His session was very informative and insightful. My favorite part was the advice he was giving to people evaluating solutions. The key advice was “try it before you buy it rather than relying solely on a demo” and “the implementation team is more important than the product”. As an ECM services provider, I was particularly fond of the last point! ; )

Seth Gottlieb, “A Guide to Open Source CMS”. Seth is another blogger in my blogroll. We originally met through CM Pros. As I told Seth, his presentation did a great job covering the key players in the Open Source CMS space and comparing and contrasting the types of solutions they solve (rather than simply checking off items in a feature matrix or trying to cover a broad set of tools).

Afterwards we had a good conversation about Alfresco. I hadn’t realized they were running in a “closed community” model. I downloaded Alfresco before the trip and had every intention of playing with it on the plane but I got sucked in to a book. Hopefully I can get to it soon.

Lisa Welchman, “Lessons Learned from CM Implementations”. What I liked most about Lisa’s presentation was that she had great speaking style and an obvious passion for the subject. The content was a little too WCM-centric, but she did cite several key lessons learned which I agreed with (and, coincidentally, echoed in my session Thursday morning).

Thursday was a short day for me. I did my talk in the morning (Thanks to all who attended!), had a quick bite, and then headed for the airport.