I hung out at mostly Stellent sessions today. Vijay talked about the FileStoreProvider, Alan had a great presentation on metadata models, and Tom was up on a customer panel. One of the questions on the customer panel was about the strengths and weaknesses of the Stellent UCM product. There were happily few minuses, and everybody on the panel said that ease of use (deployment, management, customization) was the biggest plus.

Some folks from Oracle's "Beehive" project presented "the future of collaboration." The beehive project is the latest iteration of Oracle Collaboration server, which is an email/calendar/task application more akin to Lotus Notes, and quite different from Stellent's document-centric Collaboration Manager. I missed the show, but everybody I talked to about it said it was quite memorable... however, they left out if they meant that as a good thing...

Somebody noticed that IOUG had me down to give my "50 Ways" presentation twice... I was surprised, so I headed down early to scope the room out. Then I spotted the big sign that said it already took place and is therefore canceled. On the way back, I sung by the bookstore, and noticed that they seemed to be running low on my Stellent book. I later bumped into the 2 customers who bought the last 2 copies, so I autographed them.

Its a good feeling for my niche-technology book to sell out half way through the conference... ;-)

I also spent about 2 hours in one-on-one sessions with customers. They were all concerned about how they were supposed to get started with a coherent enterprise-wide content management policy... those interactions drove the point home that there's a real need for the book Andy and I are currently writing.

And oh yeah... it snowed. Tuesday was 83 degrees, and on Wednesday it snowed. Strange... I thought that kind of stuff only happened in Minnesota.

One more half-day, then back home!