Authoria Welcomes Hundreds of Customers to 9th Annual Customer Conference

Authoria, Inc. today opened the 2007 Authoria Customer Conference at the Red Rock Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. With a theme of ìI Love Talent,î the conference brings together hundreds of Authoria customers ñ global enterprises with between 1000 and 300,000 employees ñ as well as partners, prospects, and industry experts, to exchange views on the strategic use of talent to achieve important business goals.

The three-day event will feature customers ñ including Aetna, Charles Schwab, Raytheon, SunLife Financial, Starbucks, and Wachovia ñ sharing their approaches and experiences in talent management. Keynote speakers will be Authoria founder and CEO Tod Loofbourrow and Lyn Heward, former president of creative content at Cirque du Soleil, who will draw on her experience in guiding a team of creative designers, performers, artisans, and technicians to produce original and commercially successful events.

Industry experts who will be featured speakers at ACC 2007 include:

Lou Adler, President, The Adler Group
Mitzi Adwell, Talent Management Practice Leader, The Newman Group
Josh Bersin, President, Bersin and Associates
Heidi Spirgi, President, Knowledge Infusion
John Sumser, Founder and President, IBN: interbiznet.com
Kevin Wheeler, Founder and President, Global Learning Resources
ìAs we enter Authoriaís 11th year, the need to manage talent wisely is more critical than ever, and the tools at the disposal of the HR community have never been richer,î said Loofbourrow. ìWe are delighted that our Customer Conference continues to draw the innovators in talent management - HR executives, line-of-business executives, senior managers, IT executives, and others - who are realizing the potential of talent within their organizations. This yearís conference promises to be our best to date, with the richest content, the widest range of speakers, and significant opportunities to share and learn from each other.î

Authoria Community: Where Experience Counts

The conference will mark the launch of Authoria Community, an essential part of the Authoria talent-management offering that enriches the value of Authoriaís products with the experience, perspectives, and resources that customers, partners, and others have developed in the course of talent-management initiatives.

A centerpiece of Authoria Community is a new interactive website available exclusively to Authoria customers. Within this secure website, Authoria customers can share in the wealth of experience, expertise, ideas, and materials their colleagues have generated while deploying and managing talent-management solutions. The new website features a directory of fellow Authoria customers willing to share best practices, and benchmark information on talent-management usage drawn from Authoriaís support of more than 4 million managers and employees via the on-demand model. Authoria will soon reach the milestone of 1 billion pages of its talent-management applications delivered by its on-demand servers.

Other elements of Authoria Community include access to third-party applications for specialized functions such as pre-hire assessments and competencies, customizations of Authoriaís products developed by customers or partners, regional user groups, and Authoriaís Customer Advisory Council.

Authoria Communications 2007: Better Enabling the Employee

Also being introduced at the conference is a substantial upgrade to Authoria Communications, the companyís market-leading application for communicating personalized benefit and policy information to employees. Available immediately, Authoria Communications 2007 adds new capabilities that help companies engage and retain employees. These include the ability to track individual acceptance of HR policies, improvements to the process of developing benefits and policies, support for new browsers, and enhanced search capabilities.

Authoria Communications is an integral part of the Authoria 2007 talent-management solution, which also includes applications for recruiting, performance management, compensation, and succession planning. Unlike a silo-based approach to these talent-management functions, Authoriaís integrated solutions enable employers to better leverage talent for bottom-line business results, through cross-functional initiatives such as pay for performance, performance-based hiring, and leadership development.

This yearís conference is sponsored by Authoria partners DDI, HRchitect, Iconixx, Knowledge Infusion, KMS, Lominger, Personnel Decisions International, The Newman Group, and SmartPost. For more information and a complete ACC conference agenda, please visit: