The empolis:exchange User Conference took place in Berlin on November 22nd and 23rd, 2007. One hundred ninety participants met at the Bertelsmann Residence to receive and exchange information about information logistics, content and knowledge management and other supporting technologies.
"Your events have become a highlight and have found a permanent spot in my calendar. Simply perfect - the program, the speakers, the venue, the evening entertainment, the organization and catering - everything was perfect and hard to top."
"As a Bertelsmann company and with its strong partners, empolis has great potential in the realization of innovative projects."
"Thank you again for being such terrific hosts last week at the empolis user conference. I really appreciated and enjoyed the event."
Speakers representing users and partner organizations provided insight into their current projects in eighteen presentations and break-out sessions. Sven Obertopp and André Schmitz, Versatel Nord-Deutschland GmbH und Dieter Linder, Siemens IT Solutions and Services reported about the implementation of intelligent service management in the call center and help desk. Robert Pickles und Steve Roberts from Avon Cosmetics Ltd discussed the challenges faced with multilingual catalog production. Jan Wilhelm of sd&m AG introduced how to manage diversity based on an editorial system for the Bosch and Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH (home appliances) user manuals.
A perspective on current and future technology trends was provided. Prof Dr Stefan Wrobel, Institute Director at Fraunhofer IAIS, introduced THESEUS, the research program initiated by the Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology (BMWi), with the goal of developing new internet technologies for the Web 3.0. Oliver Gürtler und Sebastian Weber from Microsoft both gave insight into modern processes in software development and presented Microsoft® Silverlight™, the new web presentation technology for the creation of rich internet applications. Complex, platform-comprehensive, interactive and visually appealing user interfaces can be created, based on these applications.
Further keynote speakers were Prof Dr Hans Uszkoreit, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Prof Dr Karlheinz Brandenburg from the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, who came to worldwide fame when he developed the music software MP3, and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ziegler from the University of Karlsruhe. Experts from empolis supplied information about the solutions provided by the empolis product platform and took a look into the future by presenting the corresponding development roadmaps.
Our partners Adobe Systems GmbH, EXCELSIS Business Technology AG, LIVINGSOLIDS GmbH, Mark Logic Corporation, Microsoft Deutschland GmbH. Ovitas, Schönhofer Sales and Engineering GmbH and Transaction Software GmbH demonstrated their software technologies complementing empolis developments during the exhibition or gave presentations throughout the program.
We would like to give our thanks to all speakers and guests who took the opportunity to extensively exchange experiences and pose questions. We are looking forward to a continuation during the next user conference on November 20th and 21st, 2008 in Berlin!
A CD including presentations, photos and additional information was sent to all attendees. Take a look at the summary of the user conference here.
