Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit

Track A: Portals & User Experience

Still the primary method of engagement for most of us, portals are poised for a reawakening of sorts, driven by shifting business requirements. Employee portals must drive higher productivity, customer portals must retain and attract more customers and revenue, and partner portals must hone processes among outside parties. A confluence of technology trends—Web-oriented architecture, REST-based interoperability, portlets and widgets, open source, and cloud computing—is emerging and evolving to enable companies and government agencies to reinvent portals in ways that drives this much-needed higher performance. This track will examine the trends and expectations driving the renaissance in portal use and capabilities.

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Sessions

Gartner Keynote: Understanding Engagement – New Insights and Interactions Driving Higher Performance

A confluence of new technologies, content, social phenomena, mobility and context is revolutionizing the way we engage with one another, be it with employees, partners, customers or constituents. It�s also revolutionizing the way all of these groups engage with one another, which will have an even greater impact on you and your enterprise. An ensemble of leading Gartner minds will show you how to leverage the opportunities inherent in this new era of engagement to drive higher performance for your organization.

Guest Keynote: Clay Shirky

New technologies and phenomena like the Web, social networking, peer-to-peer sharing and filtering, and mobility are driving a revolution in how we behave in business and society. Because of this unique confluence of technologies, we�re no longer merely consumers online; we�re collaborators and, ultimately, this collaboration will unleash a torrent of creative production that will transform the world. Clay will take us on this fascinating journey from consumption to creativity.

Portal Scenario: Mature Yet Still Disruptive

While portals are firmly established among enterprises, massive change looms. The technological, organizational and social foundations upon which portals sit will transform the market over the next few years. We'll discuss the current state of the portal market, enumerate the coming changes, and advise on how to prepare for the wave of change. Key Issues:

• What is the portal's unique role in light of evolving customer demands and technologies?
• What should companies do to architect for the portal's future?
• Who are the established and new players in the future of the enterprise portal?

The Distributed Social Web: What's Beyond "Like"?

he web is evolving from content-centric to social-centric. Facebook is the No. 1 web property in terms of traffic and page views. Enterprise vendors are adding social computing to their feature sets. Increasingly, islands of social data must interoperate through protocols and APIs. How can organizations enable the existing enterprise web presence for social interaction? Key Issues:

• What are major trends around the social web � in both consumer and enterprise sectors?
• What are the principal mechanisms for interoperability and migration of social data and social interaction?
• How should enterprises best enable their web sites and applications for the distributed social web?

Tutorial: Portal Content and SOA Governance

Organizations must balance control and flexibility and ensure compliance while cultivating collaboration. Good governance is the key. However, organizations often have separate, and too often conflicting, governance efforts around portals, content/information, and services-oriented architecture (SOA). How can companies coordinate these efforts for an effective and sustainable approach? Key Issues:

• Why are portal, content and SOA governance so important?
• How can enterprises coordinate and rationalize portal, content, and SOA governance efforts?
• How can enterprises govern while allowing the flexibility to sense and respond to change?

The User Experience Platform: Product Convergence and Market Expansion

The user experience platform (UXP) will allow enterprise developers and end users to create cross-platform user interfaces via a single set of integrated technologies, tying together currently disparate tools for creating Web sites, portals, mashups, RIA and mobile apps. In fact, the future UXP market will usurp the markets for portal products and mashup tools. The UXP brings together the technologies to support critical user experience development methodologies like user-centered design, usability testing and analytics. Key Issues:

• What is driving the UXP?
• What are the components of a UXP, and which vendors are headed down the UXP path?
• How will enterprises adopt the UXP, and how will the UXP evolve?

Battle for the Future of the Web: Google vs. Facebook vs. Microsoft

Google and Microsoft are investing billions of dollars every year, building out data centers to support their cloud offerings, and hoping to be No. 1 in a world where the cloud is central to computing. We'll focus on the differences between their strategies, and who is likely to succeed most at what. Key Issues:

• Where do Microsoft and Google stand today?
• What will be the effect on markets as a result of Microsoft/Google competition?
• How will enterprise IT decisions be affected by the battles between Microsoft, Google and emerging competitors such as Apple and Facebook?

Portal Planning and Execution

Experienced organizations know that portal initiatives should be ongoing programs, not finite projects. We'll hear about real-world experiences featuring the most effective ways to deliver short- and long-term portal value. Key Issues:

• How should companies plan portal initiatives?
• How should companies prioritize audiences and applications on the road to long-term portal visions?
• How can organizations support business goals, appeal to users, and still accomplish the IT benefits of unified portal strategies?

User Experience Design: From Web to Mobile to Social

Many organizations now realize that a high-quality user experience can provide competitive business advantage. Enterprises are adopting the technologies and practices pioneered by leading consumer web properties (e.g., Amazon, Google and Facebook). The challenge is that the web is evolving toward social and mobile, which means designers must stretch further, to cover these new bases. Key Issues:

• What is user experience design, and how do leading companies use it for competitive advantage?
• How is the practice of UX design evolving to meet requirements for mobile and social?
• What are pragmatic approaches that organizations can adopt to best meet evolving UX requirements?

The Future of Portals

The concepts, technologies and demands defining the portal market will change drastically during the next five years. We�ll identify the change agents and extrapolate the portal�s future � looking at innovative portal examples along the way. Key Issues:

• What will the best portals look like in five to 10 years?
• What should companies do to prepare for a drastically different portal market?
• What technology and services providers are best-positioned to address future portal needs?

Guest Keynote: Macrowikinomics � Rebooting Business and the World

The collapse of the financial systems and the global economic crisis of 2009 were a wakeup call to the world. We need to rethink and rebuild the corporation, and many of the industries and institutions that have served us well for decades, even centuries, but no longer can. Many traditional economic and social pillars of the industrial age have come to the end of their life cycle and are being rebuilt around a new collaborative model. How must we change change for a new media, new generation, new economy and a new age of networked intelligence? How can new insights and new interactions drive breakthroughs in performance, customer engagement and marketing?

Customer Experience: Taking It to the Next Level

The customer experience is one of a few differentiators that are still hard to copy from a competitor. Increasing numbers of directors see it as a critical competitive battleground. Meanwhile, customers have never been so willing to drop a supplier on the basis of one poor experience, and then tell as many people as they can. We'll examine the theory, importance and future of customer experience management, while outlining possible project types. Key Issues:

• What is a customer experience and customer experience management?
• Which projects deliver the most positive customer experiences?
• How will customer experience management evolve through 2020?

Agenda Builder Tool

With a wealth of sessions, it is helpful to have a tool to build your own agenda focusing on your own needs. The online Agenda Builder helps you select and add them to your calendar, and to build in networking and reflection time into your schedule. You can follow one of the specific tracks, or sessions based on maturity of your projects, business or technology focused sessions or just simply mix and match!

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