When working with enterprise content management systems, the decision to upgrade is not to be taken lightly. How will bug fixes and feature changes impact things like prior customizations and extensions (ex. API integrations and third-party tools)? Will performance be impacted (for better or worse)? Will an upgrade make your system more or less vulnerable to security risks?  And then there’s the most important question of all: is an upgrade worth the time and cost it will take to get it done?

 Earlier this month, HP announced the end-of-life for TeamSite Version 7.2. This announcement marks an April 2016 end-date for support services. For many existing clients, the decision to upgrade will be discussed in conference rooms across the world, and perhaps without resolution until almost too late. With stakeholders weighing the pros and cons of upgrading to TeamSite 7.3, 7.4, 7.5 or even 8.0, there are several areas for consideration.    

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TeamSite Whisperers are long-time proponents of working with the most up-to-date systems. If you are struggling to make the case for an upgrade, you are likely appealing to two separate, yet equally important groups; the marketing / business team and the IT team. Some may not need convincing at all. But for those who do, we have come up with a simple guide to help you sound the alarm for an upgrade in the most successful way possible.

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For those of you who missed the 7^th annual Intelligent Content Conference, you missed an industry inflection point that was, in my opinion, epic and transformational.

What made this conference so epic? Intelligent content (see definition below) started as a discipline reserved for technical documentation publishers (think your TV manual in 25 languages).  These folks have worked with structured content for purposes of reuse and translation for years.  Now, all that know-how is being exposed to marketers.

Marketers are not the only ones benefitting from this new relationship – tech publishers have rarely needed to publish content to a specific audience within a customer journey (the modern day marketing manifesto), so the notion of personalization and adaptive content is quite foreign for most tech documentation professionals. In short, the relationship between these two groups is a match made in heaven. Continue reading →

Fresh off his speaking engagement at the 2014 Confab Central Content Strategy Conference, Kanban’s EVP of Client Development Philip Wisniewski has some food for thought. For example, they LOVE their sweets in Minneapolis. Many Confab attendees made a note of a whole room full of cake! Or as we call it, brain food. Confab is definitely fit for foodies.

Between sampling the food and local libations, Philip got to work attending presentations, networking with the collective minds of Confab and delivering his own content engineering presentation, 5 Reasons Content Strategy and Content Engineering Go Together Like Milk And Oreo Cookies. Here are the three most important tidbits  from Confab Central 2014. Continue reading →

For Confab Central, of course!

As an evangelist for how marketers can harness the harmony between content and commerce, Philip has been looking forward to Confab all year as a chance to reconnect with content professionals, authors and thought leaders from Instagram, Marriott and GE. But this year, he has a higher purpose as well.

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