Ross Gardler, OSS Watch, University of Oxford and Andrew Savory, Managing Director, Sourcesense UK will consider what makes a service usable and sustainable? Is it one that offers you a service level agreement (SLA)? Or is it one that has sufficient clients that it is likely to survive long-term? And can a service that is principally a "social" service be sustainable? And how might communities of practice relate to the sustainability of an open service?

Paul Kelly and William Mackintosh, University of York will discuss various web usage statistics packages.

Andrew Cormack, Richard Dunning and Andy Powell, Eduserv will investigate the relationships between institutional single sign-on, Athens, Shibboleth, the UK Access Management Federation and more recent developments like OpenID and CardSpace and will give participants an opportunity to ask questions of a panel of experts from the community.

Alan Collins is a Web programmer with the Information Services Directorate at the Queen's University Belfast. Prior to joining the University in Autumn 1997 he was a Health Service Clinical Scientist, specialising in the diagnosis of opthalmic disease by electrical methods.

Grainne Conole is Director of the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol, which is a centre of excellence on the development and use of information and communication technology in education. The Institute hosts around 40 projects and services at any one time (funding sources include HEFCE, ESRC, EU and commercial sponsors), employing ca. 70 staff with a range of expertise and skills across the technical and educational domains. Research includes the development of information portals, digital archives, underlying metadata research and associated technology developments and the development and use of shells and toolkits for educational use. She has published over 50 publications on a range of topics, including the use and evaluation of learning technologies and is currently deputy editor for the Association of Learning Technologies journal, ALT-J.

Diane McDonald is a senior member of the PREDICT Research Group, part of the Information Strategy Directorate of the University of Strathclyde. Her current major interests are in the e-business area. She has responsibility for the development of a Managed Learning Environment, general WWW strategy and ITC security policy & strategy within the University. She is also responsible for the development of the demonstration and dissemination facilities for the West of Scotland based e-institute, of which the University is the senior partner. She was previously the Network Manager for the University.

Peter Scott is the Head of the Centre for New Media in the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University. CNM protypes the application of new technologies and media to learning at all levels. Peter's current research interests range widely across knowledge and media research. Three key threads at the moment are: telepresence; streaming media systems; and agent research. He has a BA (1983) and PhD (1987) in Psychology. Before joining the Open University in 1995, Dr Scott lectured in Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield. He has a textbook in each of these subjects. He has managed dozens of major grants, and has a bucketful of research publications. Dr Scott is on the board of the company Corous.Com, a wholly owned subsidiary of Open University World Wide Ltd., specializing in the development of corporate education and training portals. He has acted as an Internet consultant to a range of multinational corporations. He is also the managing director of WebSymposia Ltd, an Internet multimedia webcasting company.

A search page for the IWMW 2007 site is now available. It uses a Google search box and a Google Coop Search Engine. [2006-12-11]

The call for speakers and workshop facilitators is now open. Messages were sent to the website-info-mgt and web-support JISCMail lists. [2007-01-08]

The call is now closed, but if you do have an idea that you would really like included in the workshop please contact Marieke Guy, chair of the workshop as soon as possible. [2007-02-26]

Information on the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 social events, the workshop dinner and a drinks reception at the National Railway Museum, are now available. [2007-03-26]

A fly-poster for Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 has been put up on the wall at the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007 and blogged about in Andy Powell's SecondLife blog. [2007-05-14]

This year we are inviting IWMW 2007 participants to submit lightweight examples of innovative uses of Web technologies which may be of interest to IWMW 2007 participants. This could include mashups, use of multimedia, use of 3-D virtual environments or seamless access to content using technologies such as OpenID. [2007-05-24]

Bookings are now closed for the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007. If you would like to put your details on a mailing list please contact events@ukoln.ac.uk or a member of the organising committee [2007-06-01]

Paul Boag has written a guest blog post for "Brian Kelly's UK Web Focus: Reflections On The Web" blog [2007-06-04]

Keith Doyle has written a guest blog post for "Brian Kelly's UK Web Focus: Reflections On The Web" blog [2007-06-05]

An IWMW2007 group has been created on Facebook. Join up now! [2007-06-11]

This year the wiki tool provided for delegates to try out is Wetpaint. Links to pages have been set up for all plenary talks, parallel sessions, discussion groups and the exhibition. You are also free to create any new areas of relevance. [2007-06-18]

Please note that the official closing time for IWMW 2007 is 13.00 on Wednesday 18 July 2007. [2007-07-07]

John MacCulloch, UKERNA, gave a talk entitled "Networking For Webmasters.

Mark Cox, UKWeb, gave a talk entitled "Security and Performance Issues".

Colin Work, University of Southampton, gave a talk entitled "Information Flow".

Following a brief stint as a librarian in Dublin, Colin joined the NISS project in 1988 later moving to Southampton University Computing Services where he became embroiled in information services in the widest sense - from telephone systems to information kiosks. As "Information Resources Manager" Colin heads up the Southampton Webmaster team. He has been active in a range of National activities and is currently a member of UCISA-TLIG. Colin wants to be a photographer when he grows up. Colin gave a talk entitled "Publish and be Damned? - Freedom, Responsibility and AUP".

Nick is an Information Systems developer based in the Faculty of Economic and Social Studies in the University of Manchester. His role is to develop (mostly Web) applications to support teaching and administration. Nick gave a talk entitled "'He left the course 3 months ago?' - Web front-ends to student databases".

Victoria has worked at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory since 1989, and was one of the first pioneers of the web within the laboratory. She is currently corporate web manager, and departmental web manager, and is involved in a number of web-related projects including the DataWeb project to be described at the workshop. Victoria gave a talk entitled "DataWeb: Three worlds collide".

With the introduction of variable fees Universities have entered what education secretary Ruth Kelly called "a new era". Financial departments have had to find more creative ways to meet the sector's growing competitive demands and those working within universities have had to take a more business-like, customer-focused approach to many aspects of their work as they compete for students.

Paul Boag, from Headscape, considers how social participation is the cornerstone of the web 2.0 movement and has been spearheaded by sites such as digg.com. One of the underlying principles of these sites is that peer to peer recommendations carry more weight than those from either a search engine or from corporate advertising. The commercial sector has been quick to adopt this peer review mechanism with customer reviews and ratings. This talk proposes to explore how social participation can be applied to the process of recruiting new students and what lessons can be learnt from the approach adopted by the commercial sector. We will also look at what institutional barriers exist that prevent this approach and how these can be overcome.

Peter Reader, University of Bath explains that E-communications, e-marketing and social media are hot topics for university marketers and communicators, with old ideas of 'control' looking more and more unrealistic. Now the talk is of 'influence', viral marketing, students as customers, and of client management, with the web and web technologies seen increasingly as the university's most important marketing tools. So what are the challenges, and what are the issues with which marketers will face us? Expect more of "why" and "want" than of "how"!

Arthur Clune, Honeynet Project, discusses how attacks on Web servers, and internet connected devices in general have become both more common and more sophisticated in recent years. This talk will look at how people attack Web servers, and what they are hoping to gain from it, based on data from the Honeynet Project's deployment of Honeypot servers worldwide.

During Keith Doyle, Salford University talk, delegates will discover how, by taking the information architecture approach as their next step, they can improve the user experience and business benefits. Information architecture gives delegates a framework and benchmarks for managing web provision at an institutional level. This should be an engaging and entertaining talk which would help delegates decide whether a formal IA role is appropriate to their organisation. Helping delegates consider their institutional strategic approach: What is IA? How is the role covered at the moment? Should it be a specific post rather than something that's squeezed in with everything else we do?

Drew McLellan will talk about how every time non-semantic markup is used, a piece of data dies. Data was born to be shared. Discover how the use of semantic markup and microformats can obsolete common read-heavy APIs and can be paired with identity protocols and OpenID to provide casual APIs for the loosely coupled generation.

Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services (Senior Manager, Web Services Evangelism) will discuss Amazon's approach to Web-scale computing. Using this new approach, developers can use Amazon's broad line of web services to rapidly and cost-effectively build scalable and flexible Web applications. Jeff will focus on Amazon's newest services, including the Simple Queue Service, the Simple Storage Service, and the Elastic Compute Cloud. The talk will include technical details and an overview of how the services are being used by customers all over the world.

Steven Warburton will discuss how the notion of community continues to be recognised as a fundamental aspect within descriptions of shared human activity and group bonding. In his socio-cultural analysis of the work place Wenger defined a particular type of communion, which he termed a community of practice (CoP). The concept of a CoP has been somewhat abused in current literature yet it does provide valuable insights into how communities evolve, behave and sustain themselves. By elaborating dimensions of community such as shared practice, dialogue, legitimate peripheral participation and negotiation of boundaries, Wenger has provided a model that can be applied to a number of differing groups of activity. This talk will explore what we can draw from the work on CoPs, in terms of the role and identity of institutional web manager, one that is inseparable from a field of practice that remains dynamic, fluid and under constant negotiation.

Philip Wilson, University of Bath will ask how do people make use of the data you publish on the Web? If you publish a staff directory, how do people currently add contact details to their address books? Copy and paste has had its day, Microformats are a way of making the data you already publish not only useful, but re-usable and re-purposable for relatively little effort. This session considers how these data formats can help you solve specific data problems on your site.

This session will be run by Michael Day, DCC, UKOLN, Maureen Pennock, DCC, UKOLN and Lizzie Richmond, University Archivist, University of Bath. Institutional Web sites have become an increasingly important tool for disseminating key institutional information to and between staff, students, researchers and the general public. They are widely recognised as key front-office mechanisms for the communication of important information, but the long-term survival of Web site resources and data with non-transient or enduring value is often overridden by the short-term benefits of on-the-fly Web site management. As a result, even institutions with Web site archiving policies can find themselves falling victim to the so-called digital dark ages and fail to preserve valuable information.

William Mackintosh, Web Manager, University of York and Damon Querry, Senior Web Development Officer, University of Newcastle upon Tyne will be looking at Search Technology within the University Environmen. The University of Newcastle upon Tyne has implemented a Google Search Appliance. The University of York is committed to the purchase of the Google Mini. The session will discuss the reasons for selecting these products and how they add value to an institution's Web site.

Keith Doyle, University of Salford will facilitate this session. A small group of people are working towards setting up a peer group to share good practise and knowledge. In this session, there will be the opportunity for delegates working to develop University Intranets to share their thoughts on developments around intranets and portals. We will also discuss how the peer group could develop.

Duncan Davidson, Information Manager, University of Abertay Dundee and Donna Wilkinson, Information Specialist, University of Abertay Dundeed will look at their University's development plans, the related projects - University Portal and Information Architecture, where we have been, current work and the road ahead.

Paul Trueman, Netskills, University of Newcastle will be facilitating this session. Web services technology provides the opportunity to integrate applications and business functionality in to existing Web enabled VLEs. A Web service exposes business functionality by both consuming and producing data in XML format. Future online learning environments may be fully developed and maintained using a web services infrastructure. Web services solutions as yet still need to reach their full potential; particularly in the academic sector. In this session Paul will demonstrate potential uses of web services to support e-Learning and present guidelines on how to consider making best use of this emerging technology.

Andy Ramsden, Learning Technology Advisor, Learning Technology Support Service, University of Bristol and Paul Ayres, SOSIG Research Officer, ILRT will be looking at podcasts. The aim of this workshop is that by the end the participant will be able to answer the following five questions; 1) What is podcasting? 2) How do you create, distribute and subscribe to a podcast? 3) What is good practice in terms of designing and creating podcasts? 4) How might podcasts be effectively used in an educational context? 5) Where should people go for more information?

Debbie Nicholson, Web Support Officer, University of Essex will show how putting quality measures in place can prevent getting a brief for a Web design job that reads "not blue, a bit random, and not too Scottish". Don't laugh, this actually happened! This hands on session will get participants thinking about how they can introduce quality assurance procedures within the web design process. It will cover establishing a 'quality loop', creating measurable standards and will introduce ways to enable clients to be better informed about what they want from their new Web site.

David Burden, Managing Director, DADENLIMITED and Marieke Guy, UKOLN will consider questions like: Can chatbots make sites more accessible or do they break fundamental usability rules? Do users like them, or find them irritating or even patronising? Are they the next best thing or a 5 minute wonder? Can they really benefit the education sector? Can a chatbot ever really learn?

Rob Bristow, Information Services Manager, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol and Mark Lydon, i2a Consulting will look at Access Grid Node (AGN), an exciting area of development in communication within the academic, research and commercial worlds. Using open standards to transmit video and audio using IP Multicast networking, it is a type of video collaboration that allows a rich and immediate means of communicating with remote sites, while also being able to share presentations, data, complex visualizations and video. AGN is a technology that scales; from a single user node running with a Webcam on a laptop, up to a lecture theatre with multiple cameras and projectors. It also scales from one-to-one conversations to multi-site meetings, seminars and conferences.

Julie Allinson and Mahendra Mahey, UKOLN will give an overview of the current repository landscape, looking at the different types of repositories, their use within education and the range of issues relating to repositories, including cultural, social, legal, technical and policy considerations. Current JISC work in this area will be highlighted, focussing on how this work will contribute to raising quality standards in repository development, through interoperability and the use of open standards.

Cameron Neylon commenced a joint appointment as Senior Scientist in Biomolecular Sciences at the ISIS Pulsed Neutron and Muon Facility, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in 2005. Since then, in collaboration with Jeremy Frey (University of Southampton) he has been involved in the development and optimisation of blog based electronic notebook systems for the biochemistry laboratories and the development of systems for monitoring and capturing data from the laboratory, the so-called 'Blogging Lab'. Through this work he has become a prominent member of the international community advocating the adoption of a more open approach to research practice. His group is currently moving to a fully Open Notebook approach where the research worker's laboratory notebook is made public as it being recorded. This process is being recorded and analysed in his Blog, Science in the Open. Cameron gave a plenary talk on "Science in the You Tube Age: How Web Based Tools are Enabling Open Research Practice".

Ewan McIntosh is a teacher and social media specialist based in the Edinburgh area. He advises on how social media can be harnessed for public service and education management and used to improve learning. His edu.blog shows how social software is not just a gimmick and can provide exciting opportunities for learning. Ewan gave a plenary talk on "Unleashing the Tribe".

Derrick McClure is a Senior Lecturer in the English School of Language & Literature at the University of Aberdeen. Derrick gave the opening address.

James Currall has been employed in the University of Glasgow for almost 20 years. His main job currently is as Head of Learning Technology where he has overall responsibility for the University VLE. Previously he was the Director of Strategy and Planning in IT Services, where he interacted with archivists, librarians, information technologists, academics and university managers. James is also a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), where he is developing applied research into information issues drawing on his service and strategic experience and also more theoretical work on the nature of digital objects and the problems associated with their management, security and retention. James gave a plenary talk on "The Tangled Web is but a Fleeting Dream ...but then again...".

Mike is the manager of the University of Aberdeen's Web Team. The team comprises seven developers who are responsible for the majority of the University's web sites and web applications. The team also works for a range of commercial clients. Mike formerly worked at the Robert Gordon University as an Educational Development Officer, and as a researcher in Information Management. As a callow youth he worked at the sharp end of IT user support in the oil services industry. Mike has published on technology issues in education, Web usability and Web management. Mike gave the opening welcome speech to Aberdeen with Derrick McClure.

In previous IWMWs sessions have focussed on issues such as: Should we buy or build our CMS? Which CMS should we implement? How do we implement our CMS? How can we measure the impact of our CMS Implementation? And how do we address The CMS Challenge? But last year it was claimed that "There is no such thing as a silver bullet" and that a CMS will not solve all your problems. Has the CMS bubble bust? Has content management become content mis-management? In the light of new approaches, such as Web 2.0, and new 'ways of doing things' is there a feeling of disillusionment with 'ye old CMS'? Or does a CMS remain the backbone of a good institutional Web site? In this debate you will hear the arguments for and against content management systems and will have an opportunity to express your views.