By all accounts the 2009 RSuite User Conference held last week in Philly was a success. We were fortunate to have over 125 guests attend this year which included three tracks (business, technical, and DocZone).
Opening Keynote (After You Implement a CMS). Howard Ratner, CTO Nature Publishing Group is a great keynote speaker. Not only does he provoke thought around content management, but he definitely challenges the status quo. Many thanks to Howard for starting the day with a stimulating presentation.
Technically Speaking. The RSuite technical track highlighted the open architecture, workflow, transformation utilities, user interface extensions, reports, and custom searches. I’m sure by the end of the day the folks in the technical track were raising their hands saying “can I leave now, my brain if full!” The engineering team mixed up the presentations with live demonstrations which I think helped solidify the concepts being presented.
Honest Client Presentations. Presentations that puff up vendors drive me crazy. I am happy to report that the client presentations in the business track were straight forward and did not beat around the bush. Some of our RSuite projects were hard, very hard, but we successfully completed them and our clients would not be in front of the audience if they did not believe in the product or our company. Many thanks to Cengage Learning, Kaplan Eduneering, MIT Press, CQ Press, and The American Society for Training & Development for sharing their success stories.
So much to see, so little time. I was pleasantly surprised to see a number of people jump between different client case studies, technical sessions and DocZone sessions.
DocZone’s First Meeting. Our DocZone team pulled off a great first user conference meeting. The client case studies from Unica Corporation, Kyocera, and Epson were very well received, and the roundtable discussion on DocZone DITA provided a look under the hood of how DocZone manages content.
Closing Keynote (The New Speed of Publishing). Jason Monberg, VP of Product Management for Mark Logic provided the audience with one large dilemma: The gap between content contributor and content consumer is shrinking very fast – so what are you going to do as a publisher? Talk about feeling the pressure? Jason was spot on with his presentation and I think provided some good topics for the cocktail hour. A big thank you to Jason.
Thanks to all of those who attended and we’ll see everyone in 2010!
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