Mark Logic User Conference 2010 Blog

Wired Magazine for the iPad, released Wednesday, May 26.

Day Two of the MarkLogic 2010 User Conference started with a bang. As usual, the MarkLogic team got us jazzed up with some great music — and lots of caffeine — and then provided the audience with a special treat. A keynote presentation from Chris Anderson, Editor-in-chief, Wired Magazine, one of the brightest, and most forward-thinking people in the information technology and publishing arenas.

Anderson swiftly guided the audience through his story, helping attendees to understand the changing nature of business, the paradigm shift that is occurring as a result of these changing business models, the impact of these changes on user expectations, the convergence of content and content technologies, and the impact devices like iPhone and iPad will have on the future.

Inherent in his talk was an underlying premise some may have missed: Today, every business is a publisher, whether they realize it or not. Anderson explained how the firm that owns his magazine, Condé Nast, is making big changes in personnel; hiring staff that can produce content independent of the traditional print-focused paradigm, opting instead to bring on talented production staff who can create, edit, and prepare content for delivery to three channels: print, the web, and mobile interactive devices. He explained how Wired Magazine is working with Adobe to ensure the Creative Suite of software tools (commonly used by magazine publishers) fully supports the needs of digital-first publishing and eliminates as many roadblocks to productivity as possible.

[Note: Wired for iPad is now available]

Anderson also talked about the importance of publishers realizing the opportunities for developing new audiences — and making more sales — as his publishing company realized on the first day the Wired iPad app became available: 24,000 sold in first 24 hours…eight times higher than earlier sales estimates by Business Insider. He calls it “tapping the new economy”.

Anderson is an entrepreneur, a technology early adopter, a futurist, and above all, a businessman with an eye for good opportunities. As such, he shared lessons from both of his most recent works — “The Long Tail” and “Free: The Future of Radical Price” — that might be of value to organizations seeking to use new technologies like XQuery (which is the secret sauce behind MarkLogic Server) and new thinking (like admitting that relational databases aren’t the right tools for every job).

The rest of day two was packed with useful sessions including:

• The Nimble Elephant: Bringing Agile to Old School Publishing — Shannon Holman, McGraw-Hill Higher Education and Lee Fife, Flatirons Solutions spoke about they worked to create a custom publishing platform called McGraw-Hill Create. Discussed were the benefits of the solution to their customers, but also a frank disclosure of some of the challenges faced along the way and how thinking differently allowed their team to solve a complex problem with a minimum of difficulties.
• Data Integration and Information Discovery Challenges with National Security — an interesting panel discussion of folks who hail from the U.S. Department of Defense and related organizations that examined how several U.S. Government agencies are providing advanced knowledge discovery, content exploitation, and other knowledge-enabling capabilities to those who need it by leveraging XML based data integration, content management, and domain-specific ontology indexing. Examples were, as you can imagine, not of the top-secret variety, but allowed attendees an opportunity to see the type of solutions that could be built using MarkLogic Server and how the lessons learned from government agencies could be applied to their own initiatives.
• Planning for Mobile Computing While Accommodating Current Market Requirements — a panel discussion designed to highlight best practices for meeting the challenges of delivering mobile content across multiple platforms and on multiple device types, including ones that have yet to be imagined. Panelists provides some interesting use cases detailing how major organizations have applied these best practices and what their results were. 
• A CIO’s Best Practices for Content Database Migrations — Isaac Sacolick, McGraw-Hill presented a very focused presentation designed to help attendees understand how to make the business cases for migrating database content (for instance, moving all your content from a relational database into MarkLogic Server) and how to win over those who don’t see things your way, turning them into your biggest supporters. He talked about the challenges of implementing Mark Logic at BusinessWeek and McGraw-Hill and spoke about the importance of realizing that the challenges are as much — or more — about people and process, as they are about technology and change.

The day ended with a short session introducing the MarkLogic Developer Community with Jason Monberg, Vice President, Product Management, MarkLogic who announced that the company had brought on Eric Bloch as it’s new Director of Community.

And, as usual, the final session was an always amusing conversation with the Founder and Chief Architect of MarkLogic, Christopher Lindblad. One never knows what Christopher will say, which makes the session all the more exciting. One thing is sure, you don’t get the impresion that Lindblad is rehearsed or being controlled by some marketing team. He says what’s on his mind and admits that his vision may — or may not be — the direction the company takes. He’s got a brilliant mind, a willingness to share, and an endearing sense of shyness that makes him such an interesting interview subject.

Later in the evening, MarkLogic entertained hundreds of attendees at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. It was an amazing event — food, music, beautiful surroundings (including a rain forest). Outstanding.

The entrance to the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA.

The winning 2010 kick-off video submitted by MarkLogic employees. This winning video, made by Paxton, features XML Rock Star, Norm Walsh.

Watch the opening video from the MarkLogic 2010 User Conference.

As a previous attendee to the Mark Logic User Conference, I knew what to expect. Top quality presenters, relevant topics, great food and a staff that has an amazing attention to detail. This year’s event is no different.

While there were many sessions of interest to attend, I was able to see:

• MarkLogic CEO Dave Kellogg give a humorous and informative opening keynote, cracking the audience up and providing insightful commentary along the way — view comments from twitter
• Ron Avnur, MarkLogic Vice President of Engineering, provide attendees with the product roadmap and details of future product features. He also unveiled the new MarkLogic t-shirt “NoSQL before NoSQL was cool” — view comments from twitter
• Mirko Minnich of publishing giant Elsevier give an excellent overview of how his firm is starting the move toward a digital-first smart content strategy. His presentation, “Marrying Smart Content with Smart Delivery to Create High Value Customer Applications” was spot on and described a content framework all publishing houses should mimic — view comments from twitter
• Matthew Carroll and Andy Walker of Berico demonstrate how soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan will use their solution, built upon MarkLogic Server, to extract useful information from cell phones (mobile device data exploitation) obtained during investigations of both potential criminals and other in-country locals — view comments from twitter
• Daniel Booth and Graeme Seaton of Yell.com provided an interesting one-year-later report of their progress using MarkLogic to build and manage the UK search engine’s site and content services — view comments from twitter

I’ll update you again later and share with you some details about the other sessions I attend. Until then, don’t forget you can keep track of what I’m doing (as well as dozens of other conference attendees) here.

Tuesday, May 4 at 10:45am

Smart Content is becoming a key enabler of the transition of Elsevier from content publisher to information solutions provider, providing the means for both better access and discovery of content as well as the production of data from content for new science and healthcare solutions. This presentation by Mirko Minnich will address a framework for understanding the types, sources and evolution of Smart Content, how Elsevier generates it, and how it impacts editorial, production and the user experience.

In addition, Minnich will describe the challenges Elsevier Health Sciences is facing in developing Smart Content driven solutions tailored for specific customer roles and tasks and how it is leveraging technologies like MarkLogic to address them.

This morning is the first official day of the MarkLogic 2010 User Conference in beautiful San Francisco, CA. The opening keynote session starts at 8:30 am PST and will be delivered by the always insightful, Dave Kellogg, CEO, MarkLogic, whose popular blog is chocked full of great content. The session will also include brief remarks about the MarkLogic Product Vision from Ron Avnur, Vice President of Engineering. 

I’ll be blogging from the event for the next three days, providing updates via Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and here on the MarkLogic 2010 User Conference blog. The list of presenters for this event is outstanding. Tomorrow kicks off with a keynote from Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of the best-selling books The Long Tail and Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price.

To follow along from wherever you find yourself, point your web browser to search.twitter.com and search for #mluc10.

Monday, May 3, 2010 from 4:30pm - 6:00pm the Mark Logic User Conference presents DemoJam, an opportunity for solution designers to demonstrate their work and show off their solutions. Winners will be selected by the audience and the winning contestant will receive an Apple iPad. 

Deadline for entry is April 21, 2010. To enter, send a brief description of your solution to demojam@marklogic.com. What are you waiting for?

Check out this video to learn how you can use search.twitter.com to follow all the action at the 2010 Mark Logic User Conference. Keeping tabs on what’s happening before, during and after the conference is easy. Just search for #mluc10.