In just a few weeks the CMS Myth will once again be attending, speaking at, and covering the CMS Expo in Evanston, IL. CMS Expo is a unique conference in a number of ways:

Real world experience

While other conferences give you talking heads, marketing department representatives, and sales pitches, CMS Expo focuses on real practitioners. Over three days you’ll find plenty of opportunities to connect directly to practitioners familiar with both a broad number of technical problems and (more importantly) non-technical challenges you either have encountered or will soon.

CMS Expo gives you the opportunity to talk to other business, content, design, and technology practitioners about how they’re identifying and solving these challenges. Attendees come from non-profits, higher education, small businesses, and enterprises, publishers, agencies, and government – but they all share membership in the content management tribe and a recognition that there’s gotta be a better way.

It’s not just technology

As we’ve always said here at the Myth, Content Management is not a technology problem. While there’s no shortage of technical expertise at CMS Expo, there’s also tremendous breadth into content strategy, business strategy, governance, design, measurement, and marketing. This is a conference that recognizes your goal isn’t just to get a site launched but to operate a successful business. Everyone on the team will find conversations on familiar problems and (even better) a few they haven’t yet started to consider.

Finding the opportunity to dive deeper

There’s something about spending three full days in suburban Evanston that opens up the opportunity for longer conversations. Often the best part of any conference is the hallway conversations between sessions and outside the scheduled program. CMS Expo offers the opportunity to identify folks you want to get to know and really explore more deeply the challenges and opportunities ahead of you.

Broad platform coverage

Last year’s CMS Showcase included fifteen platforms. This year’s lineup is more modest, including Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, OpenText, Jahia, and SageFrame – though undoubtedly many of the other platforms will be topics of discussion throughout the week as well.

As someone who spends lots of time involved in platform-specific conferences (DrupalCons and Camps, WordCamps, and Sitecore meetups in particular) it’s refreshing to be at a conference which includes a breadth of solutions and doesn’t segment the audience off into their own content tracks but encourages and forces cross-platform discussion and friendly rivalry.

Great speakers and sessions

This year’s agenda is full of sessions I want to see, and speakers I either want to meet or reconnect with. Here’s just a quick sample of some of the folks I’m looking forward to:

• Sarah Beckley, who will be talking about Future Proofing your Business Content and Making Your Content Dance. (Leave it to the content strategists to come up with the best talk titles)
• Jeff Eaton, a long-time favorite speaker in the Drupal community and one of our Five (More) Content Management Blogs You Should be Readingimpending Mobilocaplyse.
• Margot Bloomstein on Cart, Meet Horse: Content Strategy for Content Management. (See our interview with Margot about her book Content Strategy at Work).
• Tony White on Are you Using the Right CMS? (Will be interesting to see how he handles the CMS Selection Myth).
• David Hobbs on Content Migration (see our two part interview with David)
• A series of WordPress presentations from Aaron Holbrook, Jake Goldman, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, and me.
• Mythbuster Emeritus David Aponovich on the Five Secret Weaknesses of your WCM
• Tom Wentworth, now Acquia’s chief marketing officer, formerly in marketing at Ektron and before that Interwoven (that’s a unique background).
• Robert Rose and Scott Liewher from Digital Clarity Group
• A media and publishing panel featuring the Associated Press (Paul Caluori) and The Nation (John Cary)

I hope to see some CMS Myth readers – do say hello if you get a chance. For $100 off a three-day conference registration use code CMSX54417