SDL Innovate 2012. So Much Content!

I miss going to conferences. I helped host a college-bound high school conference ages ago. I've attended  SharePoint and Gartner conferences as a prospective or existing customer. This was my first conference as an employee of the hosting organization. I attended mainly the WCM portions of SDL Innovate 2012 and am glad to:

• Hear CMS is more important than ever
• Confirm platforms matter
• Earn the nickname "Bloggy"

I could make several posts on all the content from the Innovate conference. I'll spare you and just highlight some things that left an impression on me.

CMS is Important

CMS is important. Ian Truscott, the North America VP of Products for SDL WCMS , explained CMS is essential to CXM (Content eXperience Management). He suggests the following equation:

Relevance + Variance  = Content Explosion

For example, anyone familiar with state-specific content, just adding a few categories to the 50 states (plus Washington DC) can easily get you hundreds to thousands of variants. I still have chills for the all-state, all-specialty updates I had to manually make in at least 255 individual XML configuration files.

The also means the page paradigm is dated, as Nuno Linhares, Principal Consultant with SDL WCMS, explains on his blog, "your content model must evolve from being page-centric to being customer-centric."

Does Platform Matter?

Forecast? Data. Lots of data!