When Gartner Vice President and leading analyst Whit Andrews kicked off the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit on Monday, March 12 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL by bringing a shovel to the stage, eyebrows raised and a few thoughts went through my head. Either this guy plans to go help the construction workers outside construct that new pool at the Gaylord or he took a wrong turn and is at the wrong conference. Oh and how did he get that shovel through airport security? As Whit explained more his objective became more clear…take everything anyone has ever told you about portals and throw it out the window, as portals have evolved and times they are most certainly changing.

The future Web is here, available not only on browsers but also via a broad spectrum of access points, including automobiles, consumer electronics and more and more mobile devices. Not merely prevalent, the future Web is also multimedia-driven and operates in real time, driven by mobility, social media, streaming video and other dynamic services. Applications and user experiences are in the midst of an evolution — from the early, simple mobile Web models to today’s Web 2.0 mobile apps and, ultimately, to a world of predominantly Web apps. Additionally, cloud services will forever change how portals and user experience are designed, built, delivered, sourced and managed.

Today’s organizations need software that will enable them to not just do their jobs, but to do it in a way that is familiar and easy for them. 

Overall, we had a great week in Orlando learning about how to improve the user experience, manage content explosion, launch social initiatives, transition to mobile environments and understand cloud and SaaS options. 

We had some great conversations throughout the conference and at the Oracle booth.

Lots of demonstrations were given of Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Social Network.

And as Christie mentioned earlier this week, our Vice President of Product Management and Strategy for WebCenter Loren Weinberg presented on the topic of customer engagement and talked about how organization’s relationships with their customers have fundamentally changed today and the resulting impact that has on their priorities.  Loren also talked about the importance of customer engagement, why that matters now more than ever, and what you can do to help your company or organization succeed in this new world.

The question asked in every keynote and session was a simple one: What is your “ah-ha” moment? I personally had quite a few, some of which I’ve captured below.

• 70% of internal social initiatives eventually fail.
• By 2014, refusing to communicate with consumers via social media will be as harmful as ignoring emails/phone calls is today.
• Customer engagement = multi-channel + social & interactive + personal & relevant + optimized.
• If people choose to talk about your product/company/service, it's because it's remarkable. -- Seth Godin's keynote (one of the highlights of the conference!)
• The Web will become the primary method used for delivering content and applications to mobile devices.
• By 2015, 20% of smart phone users worldwide will conduct commerce using context-enriched services on a weekly basis. 
• 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience.
• 6 P's of Quality User Experience. Product. Enabled by: People, Patterns, Process, Profit, Priorities.

Did you attend the Gartner Summit? What were your ah-ha moments?