John Petersen of Sutro Software has focused on portals for most of his working life. He has agreed to host a roundtable which will address the intersection between web content management and portals. John has a background with portal pioneers Epicentric, which were later acquired by Vignette.

Our roundtables is a special type of conference session without prepared slides. Join the discussion at the portal table in Philadelphia, where you can work with peers to identify some of the emerging best practices about when or if your web content projects can benefit from portal technology – or add your thoughts below.

Nathan Gerber

The J. Boye Conferences are first and foremost user conferences. Like most other conferences we also have inspiring, exciting and innovative presentations by experts and analysts. However, unlike most others, we emphasize real stories from practitioners. Nathan will share how his team is organized, how they arrived at their particular method of organization and his lessons learned throughout the process.

Regardless of whether you are based in higher education or not, you need a foundation and structure to govern the direction and implementation of your online projects. Besides Nathan, the opening session will be kicked off with a keynote from strategy expert Christine Pierpoint on how to roll out effective Web governance. In the session, you can also hear how the London School of Economics and Political Science  translated web governance and strategy into practice.

There are many different ways to make your web team a winning one, but certainly also many pitfalls along the way. A crucial ingredient in the recipe seems to be governance – a much more important ingredient than technology!

Among the key milestones for the Cleveland Clinic during the last couple of years have been:

• A CEO blog
• Various eHealth initiatives
• Facebook pages (some of which unofficial)
• Google Health partnership
• Twitter
• YouTube

The rising importance of social media made the Cleveland Clinic create a social media manager position in marketing earlier this year.  A more comprehensive monitoring and engagement strategy has now begun.

There are several good use cases for social media within healthcare as illustrated in this brief presentation

How have you navigated the social media landscape? Whether attending in Philadelphia or not, please drop a comment and share your experiences.

Stephen will be presenting the LSE case on our online strategy track in Philadelphia in May. In February he shared part of his story in a publicly available presentation to the J. Boye UK Web Manager group. In Philadelphia he will further explore the vital difference between management and governance, and explain how they impact upon the strategies and tactics required for the efficient and effective delivery of an organisation’s web presence.

Universities excel at governance, with significant resource and structure dedicated to it. Stephen will present models for other organisations to consider, take away and deploy.

NB: If you are interested in learning more about the role of higher education web managers, you can also join our dedicated higher education track, where you can meet speakers from institutions such as John Carroll University, Karlstad University (Sweden), Selkirk College (Canada) and University at Buffalo

The volunteer team at our 2009 European conference

Why you should be a volunteer

Volunteers receive free attendance passes for the entire conference with exciting keynote speakers and 8 tracks on intranet, online strategy, user experience, web content management and more, which each offer a unique conference experience with international experts and carefully selected case studies.

We need you!

Typically our volunteers are people with an involvement in the industry, who are interested in the conference; students as well as industry professionals.

You don’t have to be an expert! Students and enthusiasts work alongside industry professionals. Enthusiasm, service mindedness and interest in IT are the most important qualities.

Sign up as a volunteer

With almost 16,000 followers on Twitter and as the author of one of top 25 marketing blogs in the world and creator of one of the first online communities associated with Fast Company magazine Valeria is a well recognized expert in social media.

According to Valeria, many Web site owners don’t think about online content and marketing as a system. Stanford Professor BJ Fogg covered this from another angle at our recent European conference, where he advocated “designing for behavior change” and “putting hot triggers in the path of the user”.

What has worked for you in terms of making a real connection with your customers?

Bob gave a highly praised presentation on how to improve websites of higher education organisations at our 2o09 European conference and we are thrilled to welcome him back in the line-up.

Bob has worked with more than 40 colleges and universities since 2006 – helping them to develop strong and efficient online marketing communication programs. In addition, he has authored several books on the subject of marketing communications. In this brief video Bob shares what he learned at our Europe conference and why he recommends going to Philadelphia:

In his Philadelphia talk Bob will cover two main higher education marketing challenges:

1. To reduce printing costs as much as possible by moving major print publications (alumni magazines, annual reports, and more) online
2. To create websites that engage visitors and increase effective online communication.

Drop a comment below with your thoughts or questions about the latest trends in higher education marketing.

NB: There are 2 months to go before the conference – and early-bird prices run until March 14th.

Mary Jo is a highly experienced Microsoft watcher – having covered the industry for over 20 years for a number of publications including ZDNet and eWeek. For the last 10 years she has had a strong focus on Microsoft’s strategy, products and technologies, which has earned her much praise within the industry.

Microsoft Office 2010 is expected out in June 2010 together with a new release of SharePoint. The long-awaited new release will undoubtedly cause much speculation about what is coming next as customers will consider when to upgrade.

• Web operations guru Christine Pierpoint will do an opening keynote on Web Governance With Teeth – How to implement effective Web governance
• In the 2nd session, you can join taxonomy and information management consultant Stephanie Lemieux on her search for simplicity, specifically when it comes to effective search strategies
• Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a world expert on content, document and web content management issues, will share his perspective in the final session with a thought-provoking presentation on why projects so often fail

The track will also feature several case studies, giving you the all-important  peer perspective. We expect to confirm case studies shortly.

If you are pondering on how you might take quick action using all the great expert advice you’ll be offered at the event read our posting on Web strategy in real life – what happens after a great conference?

Among the confirmed speakers on the intranet track are UK-based Martin White and interesting case studies from IKEA, Perkins Eastman Architects, Thermo Fisher Scientific and UNDP.

The intranet track is your opportunity to discuss intranet trends and learn from other intranet professionals.

For more on intranets, you can join a 3-hour session on  tutorial day, Tuesday May 4th, when Jane will host a session on Using governance to future-proof your intranet.