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.

A sponsors page containing details of the sponsorship packages available has now been set up. Interested parties should contact the organisers. [2006-08-24]

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]

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]

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

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

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".

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.

Alison Wildish, Head of Web Services, Edge Hill University will talk about how Students are asking each other for help and advice rather than coming direct to our staff. These same students are advising our applicant community about University life and they're all doing it in an "informal" environment. These are all positive developments but it does mean we start to ask the question... if we're moving towards developing and nurturing students in these online communities and empowering them to help themselves, will we still need a "corporate" Web site in the future? Furthermore with the increase in "free" tools available such as email, file storage, blogs etc. - will Institutional systems be a thing of the past?

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.

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.

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.

In December 2005 the Web Development team at the University of Bath set up a departmental wiki where they could keep track of information. In this workshop Philip Wilson, University of Bath will explain the reasons for using a wiki, not just for education but for codifying knowledge and working practices in departments and how they can best be utilised so that it is used by everyone in the department, and how to stop it becoming an unmaintained silo of archaic data.

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.

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.

Brian Kelly, UKOLN and Lawrie Phipps, JISC will review the barriers which we may face when implementing a Web 2.0 strategy and will outline a model and strategies which can be be used in order to address such barriers.

James Souttar has been part of the Precedent team since its inception in 1989. Prior to working at Precedent, he worked for the corporate identity specialists Wolff Olins. His area of expertise is branding and communications within the education sector specialising in working for universities: Cambridge University, Universities of Sheffield, Southampton and Reading, Oxford Brookes, Middlesex and Hertfordshire. James extensive experience has led him to be invited to write and lecture extensively on both sides of the Atlantic. For two years he was consultant lecturer at Central Saint Martins (now part of the University of the Arts). He also taught at the Lincoln College of Art (now part of the University of Lincoln) and Epsom School of Art. In addition, both he and a colleague were invited to give a week long charrette to the School of Communication at Virginia Commonwealth University. James gave a plenary talk on "Web 2.0 and Brand: Theory and Practice" and facilitated a workshop on "Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Support a Brand Focused Marketing Strategy".

Marieke is currently a member of the Interoperability Focus team at UKOLN. Interoperability Focus is a national activity, jointly funded by JISC of the Further and Higher Education Funding Councils and the MLA. Marieke is a member of the IWMW 2008 organising commitee and facilitated workshop sessions on "Embracing Web 2.0 Technologies to Grease the Wheels of Team Cohesion" with Andy Ramsden and on "Approaches To Web Site Preservation" with Brian Kelly.

Andy Powell gave a talk about how it goes without saying that the Web has changed significantly over the last 10 years and that institutional Web sites have changed with it - just use the Wayback Machine to look back at your own site in 1996 to see what I mean. Such changes have not simply been in terms of style and substance but also in terms of how we expect to interact with, use and re-use the content and services being made available to us. In short, the Web has changed us and the way we learn and work. This talk will look back over the last 10 years and highlight some of the key technical, social, political and legal changes that have taken place and the impact these have had on the institutional Web sites we deliver now and will deliver into the future.

Randy Metcalfe, OSS Watch and Brian Kelly, UKOLN gave a plenary on openess and the Web manager. Openness appears to be all the rage: open standards for interoperability, open source for software development and deployment, and open content for sharing knowledge. What brings these phenomena together is a commitment to openness. But how do colleges and universities engage with openness? And more particularly, what does it mean for institutional Web managers.

Ranjit Sidhu from Nedstat gave a talk about how after discussions with various people in the education sector it became clear that there was a requirement for some industry wide statistics about Web site activity. These Sector Statistics will provide organisations, specifically universities, with a means of benchmarking the performance of their Web site.

Kate Forbes-Pitt, Systems Manager, Web Services, London School of Economics will talk about aims aims to problematise the document, asking the following questions: what is a document? How does it impart information to its reader? Can it be replicated on screen? It proposes answers using the arguments of Hughes and King (1993) who contend that the document is a layered social artifact that exists to 'wrap' content. This 'wrapping' provides the reader with the knowledge they need in order to apply social rules to their reading of the document, and so become able to interpret its content. Some information systems writers argue that the need for social knowledge in a task negates the possibility of its automation. Following the logic of this argument, delivering a document (a container of rule) through the existing set of social rules that govern Web interaction, means that the full function of the electronically reproduced document becomes masked or confused. At best this makes the role of the document superfluous to its content, making the content difficult to interpret. At worst it makes the content incomprehensible to the user. This raises a further question: what purpose is served by reproducing documents online? Following from the above arguments, it is possible to argue that 'pure' content, rather than the imitation of printed paper, is likely to be a more successful way of imparting information through the Web.

Universities undertake research through a mesh of partnerships, collaborations and contractual relationships. Major research funding bodies, such as government departments, are increasingly encouraging their contractors to adopt formal quality assurance standards - such as ISO 9001:2000. If you haven't come across this already, you are likely to see it very soon! In this talk John Gilbey, Institute QA Manager, IGER discussed the impact of quality standards on the way Web resources - internal and external - are defined, delivered, managed and reviewed in academic environments. An over-view of the quality requirement is presented, along with some pragmatic suggestions to help you deal with it.

Michael Webb, IT and Media Services Head, University of Wales, Newport gave a talk about how Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way our staff and students (potential, current and past) relate to one another and our Universities. Embracing these technologies provides a great opportunity to enhance the University experience, but also presents a number of risks and challenges. So how do Universities develop a strategic approach to embracing Web 2.0?

Chris Scott from Headscape gave a talk on "Real World Emerging Technologies". Falling University entries and top-up fees have contributed to a step-change in the operational environment for the HE sector. This change has resulted in an acute pressure on institutions to innovate for success. This presentation will explore some opportunities for institutions to capitalise on new and emerging web technologies in response to such changes. While there is much hype about Web 2.0, there are some genuine opportunities for straightforward applications of Web 2.0 technologies in institutions that are low risk and low cost, and have potential for significant returns if they are introduced and managed correctly and the right people are involved.