Today I attended the AIIM "From Collaboration to Process Control: Whats the ideal information management strategy for your organization" (phew, bit of a mouthful) day at the Toronto metro convention centre - and a jolly good day it was too !
The first "October AIIM event" I attended in Toronto was 3 years ago, before I was even living here (we were on our trip to get 'landed' status) and they get better and better.
John Mancini, President of AIIM kicked the day off with a great opening session. He noted some updates on the ever growing mountain of digital content and the ever increasing speed of growth, but also noted that Moore's Law for raw computing power (CPU power) has been surpassed by improvements in communications technologies (providing ever greater bandwidth) and storage technologies (how much you can cram on a disk plater.) John suggested we are rapidly approaching a tipping point with respect to content volumes and content management technologies. In the great tradition of AIIM "8 things about" lists, John presented 8 key points:
- You can't dodge the content tidal wave
- Ubiqitous computing has an impact on both creation and consumption of content
- Green issues - the new selling point for ECM - get rid of all that paper !
- You simply can't do everything manually anymore (ref: business processes)
- "Social everything" - humans are social animals, go figure......
- Collaboration needs governance - I certainly agree with this one
- We are moving into an era of simplicity - if records management is perceived as a nusiance by 95% of your users, then your solution better be simple
- Mismanagement risks are rising - and not only in the highly litigous U.S. of A !
At one point John made the point that 80% of the worlds Lawyers are in the U.S., after John a gentlemen from Autonomy did a brief session as they were a key sponsor of today's event, and he gladly noted when describing their healthy financials that this was largely thanks to all those lawyers.......
The interesting point from the Autonomy presentation was the "management in place" of records in SharePoint installations using their 'ControlPoint" product, not one I knew much about previously.
After a quick hello to Ross, Doug, Kim and John from the Royal Bank of Canada's ECM centre of excellence (I see them here once a year !), it was off to the elective sessions:
Hyland Software did their normal 'transactional content management' pitch for OnBase. It's an effective and slick presentation of the message, and I have seen it a couple of times before. I have seen OnBase in use in the insurance industry when I was consulting and I can see its strengths in these transactional scenarios.
As the next session was all scanning / imaging / capture in both rooms, I disappeared back into the boothes of the small 'show hall' for a lovely chat with the ladies from Oracle. My current employer is a big Oracle user on the database front, but I have always liked the product formerly known as Stellant, which is of course now Universal Content Management within Oracles Fusion middleware portfolio ! The shock on Michelle's face when we told her you could not access Hulu from Canada...... :-)
The next session was AllStream who had some interesting case studies around combining Unified Communications with portals, which is close to our heart as we are a SharePoint shop and we are about to go live with MS Unified Communications soon.
For the final break out session I broke my promise to go and support Oracle UCM and attended the Microsoft "ECM for the masses, how to deliver on the promise" session. This was a good session by a Product Manager who had obviously honed his skills at the 'big party' in Las Vegas last week. It was not a full on SharePoint 2010 product pitch, but more a generic examination of the issues characterised as the tension between: Control and Compliance on one hand, and Freedom and Flexibility on the other.
Personally I chose to receive part of the message on SharePoint governance issues as "SharePoint proliferation, well thats your fault....." (mmmm' nothing to do with Microsofts marketing machine then?). Having said that our presenter then focused on moving forward, and that a major aim for SP2010 is the 'democratization of ECM', in other words it does not have to be control and compliance versus freedom and flexibility, but rather it should be a balance with contextual equalibrium being sought for each particular project or implementation.
We all went back to the main hall for a presentation from HP on Universal Records Management (URM, a bit too close to UCM ?) in other words the product formerly known as Tower's TRIM.
Then it was time for a quick chat with the marvellous Cheryl McKinnon, the new CMO for Nuxeo
the open source ECM platform. Cheryl forecast a tipping point of her own, that finally within the next two years the open source vendors will be taken seriously. With Nuxeo, MindTouch and Alfresco on the plot, I would agree with her. Strangely enough, for a massive Canadian company, Cheryl's old employer OpenText had not decided to grace the event with its presence.
Finally, John Mancini closed us out, with a final keynote that was as entertaining and as informative as his introductory one. John noted that the latest AIIM "8 reasons" paper (8 reasons you need a strategy for managing information - before its too late) is available as PDF, Kindle eBook, Sony eBook and formats I have never heard of, plus you can even download an audio book version from iTunes !!
This is a brief posting on the above AIIM seminar held in the Metro Convention Centre downtown today, Toronto being the last city on the north-american 'tour' for this year.
The general opening session by Peggy from AIIM concentrated on definitions of ECM and BPM and questions about how many people in the room (which was pretty full) were already using, or planning on using Sharepoint, and what for. Oh yes, I should explain, Sharepoint and BPM were the twin themes of the day, the reason for this, as Peggy explained, is that while in real life Sharepoint might not do everything MS tells us, or as easily as they would have us beleive, it has changed the market place and it certainly is the 800lb guerilla in the ECM room.
We then had a guy from OpenText do a brief, and generic presentation on educating users, as OpenText were the 'education' sponsor of the event, and if you have ever read my blog before you will know I am big on the concept of educating users in information management (as opposed to 'training' them on a specific solution), and I am also a big fan of AIIM training courses.
The day then split into two tracks, so you had to make a decision on which session you were going to attend.
My first session was one by SpringCM (the SaaS CM provider) entitled: 'Extending Sharepoint beyond collaboration'. An interesting session contrasting what an in house Sharepoint installation might be good for, versus a SaaS offering like Spring. Also noted that the current sweet spot for SaaS is the Small to Medium Business space, and also more or less autonomous departments of larger enterprises. The speaker also had some intereting points on 'configuration versus customisation' (he is preaching to the converted with me.....) and on how with a SaaS offering like SpringCM if you want to add Records Management to your content management they just 'flick the switch' - Mmmm' I doubt its really that easy, retention policies anyone.... ? All in all an interesting session.
Next up was EMC with 'Got Sharepoint, get control!". Again, with this session EMC were pretty much preaching to the converted. You can sum up this session by a qoute from towards the end of it; "its not a competition, this is not about Documentum versus Sharpoint. If it was a competition then with millions of seats deployed, Sharepoint has already won".
While I question exactly how many of the millions of the MOSS licences are actually in use, we understand the point. So, its not a simple or direct competition, which allows EMC to say that Sharepoint is great for 'basic content services' and its a great User Experience (UI), but it does not do BPM (only document routing workflow), its not a sophisticated RM solution, it does not fit particularily well with birth to death content lifecycles and HSM / tiered storage. All what you would expect from EMC of course, and personally I agree with much of it, but you may not.
However they also got onto the Sharepoint governance track, and noted that Microsoft themselves apparently have over 100,000 Sharepoint sites - nightmare ! Finally for the content management geeks out there, they gave the 'storing data as BLOBS in SQL Server' architecture a good kicking - and this I completely agree with. All in all, another good session.
Next up was Clearview with 'Transcending Federated Search: unifying and managing multiple repositories such as Sharepoint with robust ECM services". Blimey, could they have come up with a longer title ?
A very entertaining speaker who dealt very well with his frozen Powerpoint slides that would not keep up with him. Nicely started with pointing out the differences between WSS and MOSS, and had a truly excellent set of one liners under the heading of "order from chaos". So in turn, this is his take on Microsofts progression;
1. we started with 'creative' use of file shares
2. we progressed to 'extended' use of Outlook (.pst as filing cabinet ?)
3. we are now in 'ill guided' proliferation of Sharepoint
I love that, I think its a great continuum. He went on to discuss the CMIS standard and 'virtual domains' i.e. federated managment of multiple repositories, and finished with a small amount of Clearview specific stuff.
Final session was Hyland Software "ECM vendors should practice what they preach". An excellent session which can be summed up easily in one sentence - "ECM is a strategy, not a single product". Some very cogent arguements against trying to do everything within a single 'suite' from a single vendor. I like that point that even if you have 40,000 seat deployment, in a 200,000 global enterprise, thats a 'point solution' - a nice observation. He also noted that due to growth by acquistion, even the really big vendors have product sets that are better at some things than others. In the Sharepoint context he was noting its strength in the 'basic content services' space; "most of us need something better than file shares and Outlook, we need ECM for the little guy".
Unfortunately due to returning to the office early for other committments I missed ABBYY's after lunch keynote on "Bridging the gap between ECM and BPM".
Overall a good and interesting seminar, with the vendors sticking true to AIIM's desire to present 25 mintues of generic content or case studies, but not product sales pitch. Although one person I spoke to found this a tad frustrating as he wanted to know more about each vendors capabilities, oh well, you can't have it both ways.
Another interesting thing was the amount of Records Managers who put up their hands (every time someone asked them to) - does this mean they were all looking for something other than Sharepoint for RM , well thats a bit of a leap on my par. Overall the message I got from the whole thing, but one that was not said in these exact words was: "Sharepoint, its a freakin portal, OK ?"
