Communities, conferences & consulting
for online professionals

Tony Byrne

President, Real Story Group

Biography

Tony Byrne

Tony Byrne oversees all of The Real Story Group’s technology streams and properties, which include CMS Watch, Enterprise Information Watch, and SharePoint Watch.

In 2001, Tony founded CMS Watch as a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies and publishes research comparing different solutions head-to-head. Over time, CMS Watch evolved into a multi-channel research and advisory organization, spinning off similar product evaluation research in various areas of Enterprise Content Management. As a result of this natural evolution, in 2010, The Real Story Group became the parent company of CMS Watch and its sister entities, EI Watch and SharePoint Watch.

Prior to founding CMS Watch, Tony led the developer team a systems integrator, following previous stints as a programmer, journalist, and international educator.

He is also the author of the Web CMS Report and publisher of the Enterprise Portals Report, the Enterprise Search Report and the ECM Suites Report, and an avid Green BayPackers fan.

Real Story Group

Real Story Group

Real Story Group is a buyer's advocate for enterprises looking to invest in content technologies. They publish independent research that helps customers sort out suitable technology choices for their specific needs. The company's research is known for its technical depth, readability, and absolute neutrality.

Tutorial

Insider's Guide to Evaluating and Selecting Social Software

Tutorial Day, Tuesday November 2nd, 13.00-16.00

Enterprises seeking to implement social software find that competing vendors frequently differ markedly in functionality, maturity, approach, and support. Industry commentators quite properly tend to focus on the cultural and organizational aspects of social computing. Yet, technology choices can also have a major impact on business effectiveness at a time when many organizations are looking to extend departmental pilot projects to enterprise-wide programs – only to discover that contemporary social computing offerings frequently struggle to scale in terms of performance and administration.

This fast-paced tutorial will share customer research from noted evaluation firm Real Story Group on leading social software platforms, and provide a framework for customers to assess technology choices based on their particular needs. Specifically, a methodology for mapping business needs to technology alternatives, as well as a roadmap for evaluating social software vendors will be provided.

The tutorial will also de-mystify the highly crowded and fragmented social software marketplace – Including collaboration suites, pure-play blog / wiki / social-networking products, community platforms, and revamped portal offerings from major vendors— enabling participants to compare and contrast competing vendors. Real Story Group will also share strengths and weakness of some of the leading players, based on customer research.

The tutorial will conclude with an exploration of best practices in technology selection and implementation.

Course Outline
-Mapping the Social Technology Landscape
-Aligning Technology Evaluation with Business Use-Cases
-Assessing Common Functionality and Architectures
-What You Should Know About System and Administrative Services
-Categorizing the Vendors
-Strengths and Weaknesses of Key Players
-Best Practices for Selection and Implementation

Who Should Attend
-Developers and Systems Architects seeking to learn more about the “back-end” of common social toolsets
-Program and Project Managers leading technology selection projects
-Enterprise Architects looking to reconcile competing internal social computing projects
-Consultants needing to teach clients about the Social Software marketplace
-Community, Web, and Intranet Managers looking to compare their incumbent social applications against what’s available in the marketplace

You Will Learn
-11 common social computing business scenarios and how they map to relevant toolsets
-Pros and cons of 12 different types of social applications
-19 universal application, administrative, and system services, and why they matter to your implementation
-How to group and differentiate 30 leading social software vendors and open source projects into 6 major marketplace categories
-Pros and cons of several of the major platforms, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle
-Best practices for identifying the “best fit” for your enterprise

Download slides

Presentation

Market Overview Going Into 2011

Track: Web content management
Conference Day #2, Thursday November 4th, 10.30-12.00

The Web Content Management technology marketplace continues to thrive, with dozens of open source and commercial offerings expanding internationally.  Not surprisingly, most innovation is happening among the smaller, more nimble vendors, but larger players like Microsoft still make a case for a more "platform"-like solution.

In the meantime, vendors are jostling to add more site- and experience-management services to their tools, as well as additional social components.  This session will review trends in the marketplace going into 2011, and outline some of the trade-offs customers face in a changing environment.

Download slides

Roundtable discussion

Web Content Management: Where are we heading?

Conference Day #2, Thursday November 4th, 14.30-15.30

Downloads

cmf2005

cmf2006

cmf2007

jboye08

Philadelphia 2009

Philadelphia 2010

Philadelphia 2010