The 200 or so attendees of this conference got their money's worth as the sessions were both timely and lively. The fascinating thing about the portals market is how diverse the audience is, both in applications and technology base. Attendees range from county officials trying to get a good intranet up, to major global corporations with applications in 30 countries. The big theme of the conference was collaboration and web 2.0 technologies. Interestingly, it is the governence that is worrisome, not the technologies. Companies are scared to let their people run free. Taxonomies are also popular, with sessions packed to the walls.

There were just a few exhibitors so there was plenty of time to chat with all of them. From the content perspective, it was nice to see aggregator Yellowbrix selling customized feeds of content into the enterprise. A new company to me is Vamosa, who creates software to help manage content. Of particular interest is their Content Migrator which they claim can take any format of content and convert it into any other format. Sounds great for those with legacy formats.

Overall this was an interesting conference for me. I am so used to information industry events, I sometimes forget that most of the world thinks differently. Technology was more important than content here, although no one though content unimportant; it just wasn't their thing.