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Tony Byrne

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JBoye 2009 conference wrap-up

8-May-2009

Tags: Enterprise Search, Evaluating SharePoint, Web Analytics, Web Content and Experience Management, Implementation, SharePoint 2010

I had the pleasure of participating in the JBoye 09 conference in Philadelphia, USA earlier this week. For those who missed it, here are some interesting tidbits, in no particular order.

Lou Rosenfeld talked about the importance of cross-pollinating the work of information architecture, content management, and user experience (money quote: "CM-UX = money down the toilet"). But the meat of his keynote revolved around how to reconcile the different approaches of web analytics and user experience. Web analytics tries to answer "what." UX tries to answer "why." Of course you need to ask both, but when you ask them together, you can get some very revealing answers.

Jim Hobart gave a high-speed tour of different approaches to navigating complex hierarchies, based on actual customer testing. A sprinkling:

• Avoid three levels of trees in casual user interfaces
• Avoid cascading menus or menus that require fine-motored mousing skills (we have to fix ours!); indent, or use single-level drop-down instead, with lots of signaling
• The ideal wait-state for a mouseover pop-out is 1250 to 1800 milliseconds, depending on the size of the target area
  

From the annals of making-sure-your-SharePoint-consultancy-knows-what-the-hell-they're-talking-about: Dorthe Jesperson of JBoye shared an anecdote from a major Danish enterprise whose Microsoft partner told them repeatedly (!) that, "it's impossible turn off MySites." Ahem. Actually it's considered a best practice by many large enterprises to disable MySites upon initial install and then selectively turn them on after addressing technical and governance issues. See our SharePoint research for more details.

The ever thought-provoking Martin White and Bob Boiko set off some great discussions about whether we should call ourselves "information managers" rather than "content managers." The debate is of course partly over semantics (personally, I think Information = Content + Data, but some people find that too trite), and partly about better marketing the importance of what we do within the enterprise. Is "information manager" a more impactful title? ...I don't think so. But then, what is...?

On a related note, I had the pleasure of moderating the final "town hall debate" between Dana Hallman of the US Treasury Dept and Jerry Boyle of Thermo Fisher Scientific. The following resolutions were put forth to the audience, who voted on them after some lively sparring:

"Face it: Your privacy is long gone" -- passed

"We need to stop whining and start doing" -- passed

"I've seen the future and it's SharePoint" -- failed

"Communications Directors should call themselves Information Managers" -- failed

"LinkedIn will soon become an important enterprise information management platform" -- failed

In sum, the conference was a super learning experience. If you care about web and web content technologies and practices, this is a great event.