The CMS Myth

A Giant CMS Oops

Jeff Cram — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 02:39:15 +0000

Someone working the New York Giants CMS got a little trigger happy, prematurely publishing a congratulatory Super Bowl message on the Giants website. Oops is right.

Let this be a reminder to us all to double check those workflow states.

Enjoy the big game tomorrow. My official prediction: Patriots 34, Giants 24.

Tackling website migrations: An interview with David Hobbs

Jeff Cram — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:44:14 +0000

Website migrations are one of the most misunderstood and underestimated parts of a CMS project. Thankfully we have David Hobbs to help demystify the process.

David is principle at David Hobbs Consulting, and a self described ‘Large Website Consultant’ helping clients get control of their website transformations, from strategy through implementation oversight.

I met David many Gilbanes ago and have been a loyal follower of his blog ever since. There are very few folks who cover the topic of website migrations with the detail and passion that David does. And by very few, I mean nobody else.

He recently published the second version of his Website Migration Handbook, which is essential reading in my opinion for anyone about to undertake a large-scale CMS project.

We caught up with David to delve into the topic of website migrations. The conversation covered so much ground, we’re publishing it in a two-part series.

Hi David, congratulations on the second version of the eBook. At 74 pages, this has to be the definitive resource on website migrations. You clearly have a passion for the topic. Where did that come from?

Thanks Jeff. Well, I definitely spend an unnatural amount of time thinking about website migrations. Being burnt myself is one of the reasons I’m interested in migrations. But perhaps the biggest reason I’m passionate on this is the huge gap out there. People seem to think of migrations (if they do at all) as a purely mechanical undertaking, and nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, sometimes migrations can sometimes be a purely technical undertaking. But even when there is a technical component there is usually much more outside of the mechanics. For instance, how do you align all the stakeholders behind the new system?

Another reason I think this stuff is interesting is that migrations are always at their core about finding (and creating) patterns. There’s always some order that can be applied to even the messiest situations. This can be very broad patterns like figuring out how a large number of sites are similar enough to be rolled out in a batch to the more detailed look at the texture of content.

Speaking of big undertakings, you mention megasites in the ebook. What’s the largest web content migration you’ve been a part of?

I like to think in terms of messiness, and not raw size like pagecount. Sometimes impressive-sounding numbers of pages can actually be fairly straightforward, for instance if they all follow the same template / rules / structure. Also, a relatively small site can have complexities that aren’t obvious to the site visitor. By a megasite, I mean a supersite that has lots of subsites. For instance, the World Bank had over a thousand subsites (one per country, etc) when I worked there. I’ve worked with several megasites with hundreds or more subsites and more than a hundred thousand content items.

I’ve always been a fan of your recommendation for a CMS Product Manager role. An internal owner responsible for the configuration, feature requests and overall CMS roadmap. What skills should an organization look for in assigning this role?

This is something I end up talking with organizations about a lot, but I haven’t written about much. I plan on changing this soon, and I couldn’t help myself focusing on this some in version 2 of the handbook since it’s so important (also see this short paper). Fundamentally, there needs to be a solid way of engaging with internal stakeholders about ongoing changes to the website. This need sometimes spikes right when a migration starts, when people start asking for all sorts of changes once they start using the system. Not having an effective way of dealing with this can result in Frankenstein’s monster. But moreover you’ve just got to have a way of talking with all the stakeholders while maintaining a high quality CMS implementation over time. Some organizations go out and talk with lots of people about what they want, but unbridled talking isn’t that helpful if no one is framing the purpose of the whole project. So the person playing the CMS product manager role has to have that rare blend of solid technical skills, solid business understanding, thick skin, and the ability to see through the chatter to understand and set the direction going forward.

My experience has been that organizations almost always underestimate (or ignore) the content migration effort. Any tips to help build the business case for doing it right in environments where budgets and resources are already tight?

By far my biggest recommendation, and one that I am doing earlier and earlier with clients now, is to estimate the manual effort. Especially with tight budgets and resources, it’s far better to discover potential problems earlier rather than later. But perhaps even more important is that this drives discussion about quality and the broader goals. I always challenge teams to consider both higher and lower levels of quality to see the impact on the effort required. To estimate, you want to batch the content into similar chunks (for instance, press releases) and then look at the steps of content handling in a migration to figure out how much time each step will take for each type of content. There’s a lot to this, but for starters check out Content Handling Process: Asking the Right Content Migration Questions.

We deal with a lot of myths on this blog. What’s the biggest myth when it comes to web content migration?

Aside from thinking that migrations are entirely technical, the biggest myth is that all web content migrations are the same! But migrations vary widely, even if we just look at the mechanical transformation. For instance, I encountered one very large intranet where a significant portion of the effort was going to be rewriting large swaths of content. Sometimes the site structure stays exactly the same but the componentization of pages changes significantly. Other times the main purpose of the migration is better slicing / dicing of content where the metadata has to be improved. In consolidation projects there are other concerns.

One way of looking at how hard a transformation will be is how much of a change will be evident to the site visitor (x axis) and the backend (y-axis) — here’s a graph from version 2 of the handbook:

Your readers may want to check out this list of questions to help think about where your migration fits.

Thanks for all the great information David. I’m sure folks will be checking out your Website Migration Handbook for even more nuggets. Stay tuned for part two of our discussion where we’ll get into the gory details of migration train wrecks.

Death by RFP: Don’t let it happen to you

Jeff Cram — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:38:02 +0000

A few months ago, a very large public university published an open RFP to re-platform its entire network of websites onto a new CMS.

The RFP was posted in its state’s procurement website and an open source CMS community forum as an invitation to everyone and anyone. The name of the institution doesn’t matter, but I will say their men’s basketball team is very good.

We rarely respond to open RFPs, but decided to give it a shot based on our success with similar projects in higher education. Visions of courtside seats for Final Four basketball games danced in our heads.

The RFP included a comprehensive audit of their current websites complete with screen shots and in-depth requirements for the migration. They wanted an “all-in” bid, requiring a project plan and detailed approach for the architecture, development, migration, training and rollout of dozens of sites. In short, a lot of legwork to review and assess.

Like many RFP processes, this was gated by the ‘great wall of procurement’, determined to prevent any sort of collaboration with the key stakeholders to determine fit and scope. No budget was stated, or provided in the written Q&A.

So like lemmings marching toward a perilous cliff, we wrote our proposal, worked out the budgets, specified five client references, signed a whole lot of official looking paperwork, and did a final spell check. We PDF’d our massive response, and FedEx’d it off hoping for the best.

And then, silence.

After a month, we checked in via e-mail and got a one line response that it was ‘in review.’ Good, we thought. Surely they are soaking in our excellent case studies and reference materials (pages 56-75).

And then, more silence.

After the second month, our RFP Spidey Sense figured something wasn’t right (thanks Captain obvious). We sent another e-mail and received this back:

The RFP was canceled due to excessive cost. All of the proposals came in way over budget so the committee scraped [sic] the project.

Thank you for your consideration.

Losing the RFP wasn’t the end of the world. Our 15 years in business have given us thick skin for the ‘Dear John’ letters of rejection. Some don’t even bother to send notice.

But to have it canceled due to excessive costs that were way over budget? This is something that should never, never, never happen, even in the worst of RFP circumstances. Budgets can fall through, but costs should never be surprises.

I share this story not to vent (although it was cathartic, thank you), but to help others in similar situations. This scenario happens more frequently than it should.

Here are my ‘take them or leave them’ tips for how a more ideal process should unfold.

First, don’t use an open RFP process if you can avoid it. I’m sure the University was hoping to increase their chances of finding the best fit and also get leverage on pricing. And, this being a state university, I’m certain it was a requirement to open the bidding to all comers. This is a massive waste of time for everyone involved (I would guess they received 15-20+ responses), and frankly just a lazy practice.

If you must do an open RFP process, do a high level Request for Information (RFI) to get basic vendor profiles. Then invite the top 3-4 to the next stage.

Don’t rely on the RFI as a crutch for not doing your homework. Research potential partners and talk to peers for recommendations. Many qualified firms will respond to RFPs, but the majority of the good ones refuse because they are so busy with healthy referral-based business. You need to find these firms, not hope they find you.

Next, meet with each of your hand selected vendors for informal meetings (conversations, not pitches) before you issue a formal RFP or project brief. Best case scenario, you will find a firm to collaborate with to develop the scope together. The goal of these meetings are to determine if there is a fit between your two organizations and gather information on how each would approach such a project.

In these meetings I guarantee you will discover things you hadn’t considered and also learn what type of vendors you like. Be transparent with your budget and seek input on what other organizations have spent to achieve the results you desire.

Let’s be clear on this point. It is absurd to not share a budget. Your goal should be to determine how much value you can get for your budget, not play a game of cat and mouse hoping vendors come in under your budget. This also allows potential firms to qualify you out if it’s not a project sized for their firm.

If you truly don’t have a budget, be open that it is an unfunded project and you are in a fact finding mode to determine if you can afford it. Most vendors will be happy to share typical ranges up front. Both parties have failed miserably if the first time the client learns about the cost is on the final page of a 75-page-page proposal.

Lastly, don’t hide behind a procurement office. I realize this is a policy at many organizations, but it’s one that will almost ensure that you get a poorly scoped proposal from vendors who aren’t the best fit. Make the key stakeholders available for conversations.

We’ve been a part of many successful RFP-driven processes and welcome the opportunity to engage with organizations that want to evaluate a handful of carefully selected partners with open conversations.

In the case of this University, I’m sure they will eventually get their budget, followed by yet another RFP. To which we will respond:

Dear University,

Our RFP response to you was canceled due to the excessive costs involved in responding. All of your requests made our sales team over allocated so we scrapped the response.

Thank you for your consideration.

The ease of use myth

Jeff Cram — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:04:00 +0000

When looking for a new CMS, most end users agree on one thing – It must be easy to use.

Easy to use.

We hear those three words a lot during the CMS selection process.

It seems like a reasonable expectation, but it may just be the requirement that undermines your entire project. The problem is organizations rarely define what ease of use really means to them.

In most cases, the requirement gets reduced to the lowest common denominator. The focus is on a slick looking interface, the WYSIWYG editor, and inline editing tools that allows anyone to navigate to a web page and do point and click editing.

CMS vendors of course trumpet their software’s ease of use. I’ve yet to meet one that says their product is hard. Almost every demo I’ve seen spends the first 20 minutes explaining how the WYSIWYG editor and inline editing works. Features that, by the way, work almost exactly the same across most platforms today.

Here’s the reality: Web content management systems are not easy to use. They are complex pieces of enterprise software that enable hundreds (if not thousands) of different tasks.

When an end user says it needs to be easy, they mean easy for the specific task they are trying to accomplish. This is rarely as simple as making a basic text change on a single webpage as the demo shows.

Even the process of creating a new piece of new content has considerations like metadata, SEO, mobile, language, multi-channel and content reuse. Not to mention more complex scenarios like creating landing pages, forms and microsites. Apply that across a complex organization and you get dozens (if not hundreds) of different scenarios.

Some of this simply comes down to educating the users. Creating, publishing and managing web content is a much more complicated process than creating a new Microsoft Word document. Yet somehow this is the bar we set.

The CMS vendors bear responsibility as well. In an effort to keep up with growing business requirements, vendors are adding more and more features, menus, fields, ribbons and dialog boxes.

It’s not as if the vendors don’t care about usability. They do. Most solutions try to separate out the ‘power user’ management interface from the page-level inline editing tools. Unfortunately, this doesn’t usually satisfy the needs of users that have to work between the two worlds.

It also doesn’t help that the discipline of user experience within most CMS vendors is vastly underfunded proportional to the engineering effort. The rapid release cycles and evolving functionality of a CMS means most tools are getting more complicated rather than simpler.

So what happens?

The CMS that everyone loved in the demo ends up losing its luster when folks put it through the paces. End users become frustrated with the complexity of the interface as they learn what it actually takes to get their specific tasks done.

In extreme cases, the implementation is deemed a failure and the vendors and implementation partner get blamed for a poor solution that failed to deliver on the initial promises.

I’ll explore ways to avoid this unfortunate scenario in a future blog post. In the meantime, be wary when you hear users prioritize ease of use as a top goal for a new CMS without any additional details.

What have your experiences been with making your CMS easier to use? And for any vendors out there, how are you working to address usability with your software?

Why project management matters…

Jake DiMare — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:51:41 +0000

Last weekend I and fellow CMS Mythbuster John Eckman braved a snowstorm to attend the 2012 Western Massachusetts Drupal Camp. John gave a talk on a recent higher-ed project using Drupal and Kaltura. The day was filled with informative sessions on a number of different topics including a fantastic hour on the basics of Linux and Drush provided by a local tech guy named Rick Umali.

My favorite talk was given by a collaborative of developers whose session title seemed to indicate a totally successful project outcome. Although the site they presented was absolutely stunning there were many hints the project did not unfold under ideal conditions. Hanging in the spaces between the things they did share, some facts became clearly evident which were later confirmed during the Q&A:

The team accepted the project on a fixed bid.
The requirements started changing early in the process and changed often.
The team compounded their problems by starting development without confirming the requirements and before they received the designs from a third party.
Naturally, the client was unwilling to accept anything less than exactly what they expected (a moving target) and was unwilling to pay anything more than they agreed to in the original SOW (a fixed amount).

Apparently I wasn’t the only person in the amphitheater who recognized the hungry little pig they tried to makeover with the title of their talk. While the audience pelted the developers with a barrage of scope related questions I thought to myself: Had this session could have been entitled “why project management matters” the audience might have been more charitable. In terms of satisfying their client’s requirements the team eventually hit a very attractive home run. In terms of profitability, client fatigue, resourcing, and timeline, however, the team eventually conceded it was a failure (after a series of tough questions).

It was also easy to feel sympathy for the team. First of all, anyone who has been in this business long enough has been there. It’s also not hard to understand why they would interpret the outcome as a lesson on how to build a truly remarkable website on a short timeline with budget constraints. After all, consistently delivering value to the customer is absolutely an important aspiration for any agency designing and building CMS driven websites.

Alas, with experience comes the realization our role as design and build agencies must be sustainable for the long term. In this case the development team admittedly had to work many late nights and weekends. When the site was finally delivered, had they run an hours analysis, they may have learned their time would have been more profitably spent working at a McDonald’s in Kuala Lumpur than on this project. Not a recipe for success.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons why project management matters besides budget. Frankly, in over a decade I’ve yet to have a single project without a schedule. I’ve also yet to come across a project for which it wasn’t critically important to communicate often, clearly understand the scope of what my team was building, or to have an individual on the team tightly focused on the quality of the product.

Strong project management discipline says a lot about the maturity of an agency. Scope, schedule, budget, and communication will factor into the success or failure of a project with or without an experienced project manager. Failure to proactively address these factors always places an unfair burden on those members of the team who should be focused on strategy, user experience, design, development, and engineering.

How has project management affected the outcome of projects you’ve been part of?

What can millennials teach us about the future of content management?

Jake DiMare — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:10:37 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to spend time discussing content management systems with a group of millennial students at a large prestigious university. We are building a new CMS driven website for one of the institutions on campus, and the students will be regular content contributors. My objective was to determine their expectations for the new website and figure out how the existing system had failed to meet their needs.

In fact, the institute’s current content management system, technical infrastructure, workflow policies, content strategy, governance model and technical support were all missing the students’ requirements…Completely. As a result they simply registered a private domain name and set up an open-source CMS on a laptop without the school’s involvement. This ‘rogue’ site was up and running in a matter of hours and they remain satisfied with its performance two years later.

Consider the recent Occupy movement, which began rolling across the globe in October of 2011. In a matter of hours occupation groups everywhere propped up full-featured, open-source web content management systems. I had the opportunity to visit #OccupyBoston and I learned they are platformed on WordPress. They wrangle dozens of content contributors and support live video streaming, news, an event calendar and more.

In fact, they were streaming live video to a content rich website within four hours of establishing their encampment. No IT staff, no system administrators, designers, developers, user experience architects or business analysts. Heck, they didn’t even have a reliable power supply or source of bandwidth.

Such an emergent content strategy suggests millennials don’t need a fancy degree to handle technical infrastructure, content or integration with third party technology solutions. In fact, these things are hardly a challenge to anyone I’ve met under the age of 20 these days. To the contrary, building and deploying a website has become almost like an afterthought to the content it will present. Perhaps content has finally been crowned?

For anyone who makes a living helping organizations design, build, customize, integrate and deploy content management systems, there are important lessons embedded in these anecdotes. First of all, to a millennial, contributing content with a CMS is second hand. This is a generation of digital natives who has not known a world without the Internet. They had Facebook in high school. They get it. The days of explaining how to copy and paste embed codes or wasting hours fussing with typeset issues like ‘widows and orphans’ will soon be a thing of the past when they begin replacing their predecessors in the workplace.

However, as users, and the systems they use, continue to to grow in sophistication there will undoubtedly be new challenges to sort out.

For one, we know millennials are an impatient bunch when it comes to technology, accustomed to real-time data and immediate gratification. The university students didn’t have the patience for a three month discovery process. They needed a communications platform now and they assembled one in a weekend. Our processes today for building enterprise CMS platforms are anything but rapid. Marketing and technology groups running large-scale CMS environments will inevitably need to adopt more agile processes and work harder to keep up with end user expectations and abilities. We’ve seen time and time again these efforts to suppress rogue digital efforts almost always fail.

Looking at our own business, the need for web shops capable of designing and building custom business applications is probably not going to disappear anytime soon. However, many projects are simply a matter of standing up a CMS that supports basic content, news, events and user-defined forms. There are baseline expectations emerging around what such a system ‘should be capable of’ and it is safe to say forward-thinking agencies are looking at how these types of projects can get done with a more streamlined process.

Working with these students has been an eye opening reminder that our pace is only going to pick up as the next generation enters the workforce and we move into a more digitally-enabled world. My recommendation to folks embarking on new CMS projects is to look for content specialists on intern alley and encourage older contributors and editors to embrace reverse mentoring. The paradigm is about to change. (again).

How do you think the millennials will impact the future of content management?

CMS vendor match game – we have a winner!

David Aponovich — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:45:28 +0000

When the Gilbane Content Management conference came to Boston last week, we tossed out a challenge. I gathered positioning statements from 10 vendors who were exhibiting at Gilbane. I scrubbed the company names, leaving the guessing game to the CMS Myth readers as to who they belonged to.

The challenge sought the first person to identify in the comments section which vendor was associated with each statement. This wasn’t a trick question, but yeah, they all sound a lot alike. A little digging around the Gilbane site was all it should’ve taken.

Nearly a week later we now have the answers. David Clark from Technology Evaluation Centers correctly submitted the answers. He posted it in the comments under the original post. We present it here, in all its glory, with vendors names attached to their nifty marketing and positioning statements.

As for David, he wins, as we like to say here at the CMS Myth and ISITE Design, something barely worth the effort. But a fine effort it was. David, contact me at David {at} CMSMYTH dot com and we’ll arrange to send along your prize from the CMS Myth prize closet.

OK, here are the vendor descriptions, with company names attached (and links to their sites if you want to go spelunking for clarifications):

EndPlay is a leading SaaS provider of Web Content Management (WCM) solutions to enterprise clients in media, entertainment/education and consumer packaged goods
Alfresco is the leading open platform for social content management.
Percussion provides Web Content Management (WCM) software that helps businesses increase traffic, drive conversion, and improve social interaction.
OpenText, an enterprise software company and leader in enterprise content management, helps organizations manage and gain the true value of their business content.
Sitecore redefines how organizations engage with their customers online, powering experiences that can sense and adapt to a customer’s needs to increase revenue and customer lifetime value and satisfaction.
SDL is the leader in Global Information Management.
dotCMS offers an enterprise-level, open source J2EE/Java web content management system — providing large organizations a rapid development platform for both commercial-grade and multi-tenant content driven web applications.
Ektron is a leader in Web content management software and solutions.
Hippo helps companies manage and access information, protect sensitive data, share knowledge, optimize collaboration and reduce operational costs through its Content Management and Portal technologies.
TerminalFour provides enterprise Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) and solutions to medium and large sized organisations throughout North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle-East.

Let’s play the CMS vendor match game!

David Aponovich — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:16 +0000

During our web content management selection work, invariably we get asked, “How many CMS systems exist in the world?” It’s a very Zen-like question, kind of like asking, “How many stars are up in the sky?” The honest answer to both questions is: many, and each one is a little different from the other.

But you wouldn’t necessarily know listening to vendors “differentiate” their wares or articulate their product advantage. Trust us when we say there are limitless differences among the hundreds (nay, thousands) of CMS platforms — commercial, open source, SaaS, pick your poison. (Our CMS Fit Factors is one tool we use to help discern what’s right for our clients.)

But take the upcoming 2011 Gilbane Boston content management conference this week. CMS is a hot commodity right now. The stage is set. Forty vendors under one roof. A conference filled with potential buyers looking for a new CMS.

Surely with all this competition, vendors would be working hard to stand out from the crowd. To be a little different.

Not really. CMS is a follow-the-herd business. Products may differ greatly. Yet vendors (at least in the way they choose to define themselves) still find it hard to break free from the pack and tell the world what really makes them special. Cliches abound. (Try this: Go up to the first three CMS booths you see at any show and ask to hear their elevator pitch. Tell me if you don’t hear the same answer three ways. You can try this on the home page of any CMS vendor website, too.)

So the CMS world is a lot like the folks in Garrison Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon — where all the women are strong, the men are good looking and the children are above average. In CMS Land, everyone’s a “leader”.

So to have fun, I gathered key positioning statements from 10 vendors at Gilbane. I scrubbed the company names, leaving the guessing game to the CMS Myth readers.

Here’s the deal: The first person to identify in the Comments section, in order of 1 to 10, which vendors’ lines these are will win something barely worth the effort. If no one gets it by the end of the week, I’ll follow up with a post that includes the vendor names.

If you’d rather not play, then comment below on this: What are the words and phrases you’re most sick of hearing from content management companies. What words have been so overused they’re meaningless. What advice do you have? And yes, they’re listening.

OK, here are the vendor descriptions, scrubbed of identifiers. Have at it:

[Company] is a leading SaaS provider of Web Content Management (WCM) solutions to enterprise clients in media, entertainment/education and consumer packaged goods
[Company] is the leading open platform for social content management.
[Company] provides Web Content Management (WCM) software that helps businesses increase traffic, drive conversion, and improve social interaction.
[Company], an enterprise software company and leader in enterprise content management, helps organizations manage and gain the true value of their business content.
[Company] redefines how organizations engage with their customers online, powering experiences that can sense and adapt to a customer’s needs to increase revenue and customer lifetime value and satisfaction.
[Company] is the leader in Global Information Management.
[Company] offers an enterprise-level, open source J2EE/Java web content management system — providing large organizations a rapid development platform for both commercial-grade and multi-tenant content driven web applications.
[Company] is a leader in Web content management software and solutions.
[Company] helps companies manage and access information, protect sensitive data, share knowledge, optimize collaboration and reduce operational costs through its Content Management and Portal technologies.
[Company] provides enterprise Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) and solutions to medium and large sized organisations throughout North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle-East.

And if you’re at the Gilbane conference, look us up. I’ll be there, along with Jeff Cram and John Eckman, both of whom will be speaking/Mythbusting on Thursday at 2 pm (in separate sessions).

Jeff Cram: One Project, Three Strategies: What Teams Need to Know About Design, Development and Content Strategies for Content-driven Initiatives, with Seth Gottleib and Rahel Bailie.

John Eckman: What is the Proper Scope of a CMS?

You’ll never believe what’s included with CMS these days

Jeff Cram — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:10:52 +0000

I know the CMS feature wars have gone CXM nuclear, but I was shocked at what popped up in my Google Alert last week for “web content management.”

As the alert clearly indicates (why bother clicking through), the AP has an exclusive report saying that elcom is bundling the lost JFK assassination tapes with its latest CMS release. Elcom is clearly defining a blue ocean market of historical buffs interested in CMS. Gutsy move fellas.

I can see the other vendors racing to play catch-up. Unverified rumors tell us that Ektron is including a map to the lost city of Atlantis in its 8.5 documentation.

What have you guys heard?

Gilbane Boston 2011 Right Around the Corner

David Aponovich — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 04:41:08 +0000

If you haven’t yet made the decision to attend the upcoming 2011 Gilbane Boston content management conference, there’s still time left to get on board. (Use code CMSMYTH for a $200 discount on registration; the Myth is a media sponsor again this year.)

Pre-conference workshops are happening on Tuesday, November 29, while the conference proper occurs Nov. 30 and Dec. 1. The location this year is the Westin Waterfront Hotel, near the Boston Convention Center.

Members of the CMS Myth / ISITE Design team will be there: yours truly, along with ISITE’s Chief Strategy Officer and John Eckman, well known digital strategist. We’re all based in ISITE’s growing Boston office. If you’re going and want to meet up for a hallway conversation or coffee (we’ll buy), ping us individually or at mythbusters@cmsmyth.com.

Jeff will be speaking on Thursday afternoon, 2 pm, on One Project, Three Strategies: What Teams Need to Know About Design, Development and Content Strategies for Content-driven Initiatives, with Seth Gottleib and Rahel Bailie, smart people all.

And, in a pure scheduling fluke, John will be speaking head-to-head against Jeff at 2 in a session called What is the Proper Scope of a CMS?

I’ve attended about eight or nine Gilbane Boston events in a row and, glad to say, the conference has made a healthy shift from its heavier, pedantic content management overtones to a conference that’s much more pragmatic, aimed at real people and real world scenarios. (Truth be told, the speaker roster is still pretty heavy on the consultant / industry expert side of the coin).

That said, we’re excited about the track devoted to Customers & Engagement. Websites, content management, content strategy and overall business strategy is, more than ever, directed at supporting great customer experiences. Jeff recently attended the first meeting of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) and wrote about it for Fast Company. We think this is an important important shift in priorities that companies need to pay attention to. Content management –and the digital channel– is smack dab in the middle of the discussion.

Beyond that, look for sessions from pragmatists like Deane Barker of Blend Interactive (Don’t be Scared of Content Migration – But be Very Prepared!), content expert Georgy Cohen from Tufts University (Social Matters) and content marketing strategist Joe Pulizzi (Day 2 Track Keynote: Content Strategy for Marketing).

And finally, we’re glad to see CMS realist and vital content management blogger Jon Marks (aka @McBoof) flying across the pond to join this Gilbane event (Mobile Development: App, Mobile Web, or Hybrid?