Attended this one this after­noon — it was rather impres­sive, with over 600 exhibitors. I was sur­prised by the preva­lence of open-source busi­nesses there… that, along with VoIP, were prob­a­bly the two emer­gent tech­nolo­gies this year. There were also the usual busi­ness CRM/“knowledge” drones, but they gen­er­ally stuck to them­selves, so that was okay.

Aside from that, var­i­ous con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems were out in force — includ­ing one or two that appar­ently haven’t caught onto the seman­tic web yet. Most notably, one was demo­ing their CMS on a mas­sive plasma screen with bla­tantly obvi­ous char­ac­ter encod­ing errors every­where (you know, char­ac­ters dis­play­ing as black dia­monds with ques­tion marks). I quizzed one of them about it and he basi­cally said that it was some­thing to do with their not demo­ing it on a live site. Bull.

If you can’t get that sort of stuff right at a trade show, when you’re try­ing to sell prod­ucts, what are the chances of actu­ally being able to deliver?

Another provider, Netcat.biz, seemed to have the right idea in terms of semat­ics at least in their pre­sen­ta­tion at CeBIT, but a quick check of their own web­site reveals a lack of a DOCTYPE, despite their use of CSS for pre­sen­ta­tion and a not-too-horrible (or rel­a­tively easy to patch up) markup situation.

There’s still clearly a mar­ket for truly acces­si­ble con­tent man­age­ment, although I doubt many busi­ness cus­tomers would actu­ally know the dif­fer­ence. Unfor­tu­nately, that’s the real­ity of it, and pos­si­bly why nei­ther of these two com­pa­nies (there were other CMS exhibitors, but those two stood out as most ‘impres­sive’, regard­less as to the qual­ity of their solu­tion) have both­ered to develop such a product.

Sigh.

Whilst I’m on a bit of a rant, the exhi­bi­tion had a bla­tantly sex­ist cul­ture hap­pen­ing. ATI and Sap­phire were prob­a­bly the worst offend­ers, employ­ing lycra body­suits to attract atten­tion, but they were by no means the only ones. Short skirts were the norm for many female sales­peo­ple at the event — one has to won­der when the IT indus­try is going to grow up.

In all, how­ever, the event was impres­sive — sig­nage and event dis­plays were won­der­fully over-the-top, exhibitors, for the most part, knew what they were talk­ing about, and free cof­fee abounded!

Tags: content management, content management systems, CRM, emergent technologies, Netcat, semantic web, two emergent technologies, VOIP