AIIM's Info360 Conference: What's New in Philadelphia?
I’ve always enjoyed visiting Philadelphia. I lived there at one time and while it is quite awhile ago, I still get a rush when I disembark at 30th Street Station. This time I was visiting Philadelphia for AIIM’s Info 360 Conference. So aside from a nostalgic trip, what did I think of the conference?
First, SharePoint 2010 clearly dominated the show. Microsoft had the largest presence and most every vendor present had something in their booth relating to SharePoint and attempting to put this release in context. This clearly shows the market muscle that SharePoint brings to the table, but also shows that it isn’t a complete solution as is. There remains room for most every vendor to claim some part of the content collaboration story, be it integrating to, extending, and/or developing upon the SharePoint platform.
Second, despite SharePoint having such wide exposure from the participating vendors, compliance topics seemed to be on the mind of most every attendee. This was certainly not surprising given the historic focus of the conference on records and information risk management. Basic questions about security, enforcement of retention policies and the ability to quickly collect and search information in a litigation discovery situation were top topics. Interestingly “the cloud” was not prominent in this discussion — which tells me there is still educating to do regarding a cloud based approach and how critical it is to be implemented properly with the right solution.
Third, the Collaboration Track at the conference was another highlight. For two days there were real world stories of challenges faced and overcome with collaborative technologies. Sessions in that track were well attended and people were engaged. They wanted to know practical aspects of enabling collaboration such as how does collaboration fit with larger company compliance needs, is it easy to consolidate, categorize, search and retain content from collaboration applications, etc. There is obviously a real thirst for information and knowledge sharing here.
Lastly my colleague Bob Little, Vice President of Product Marketing, had the opportunity to be interviewed while at AIIM discussing some of these issues related to content and collaboration. Please take a moment to listen to his take on these issues and more!