One of The Best Industry Events I’ve Participated In…

Hat tip to the organizers, Stacey Cripps and Joyce Osborne, of the  ECM Professional Development Executive Forum held last week in Chicago. Both are committee members in the Chicago AIIM Chapter.

I participated on the morning panel, “ECM as a Career – Defining the Profession”, with Connie Moore from Forrester and Stuart Hubbard with Schiff Hardin. Jeetu Patel from Doculabs moderated and did a good job of keeping things moving.

One way I judge the value of events I am asked to participate in is if I learn something new. I learned a lot and found the questions from the over 100 attendees in the audience thought provoking and interesting. As panelists we strived to share our experiences and provide help and guidance for those looking to advance their careers in what I called “Information Governance”.

Stacey and Joyce did a fantastic job organizing the event by inviting interesting panelists and providing a great opportunity for the attendees to learn and network with others in the industry.

They are planning to do this next year and I encourage anyone to who is interested in advancing their Information Governance career to plan and attend.

Well done!

Technorati Tags: AIIM,ECM

Microsoft Begins to Pull The Curtain Back on Office 2010

Microsoft is beginning to talk about the features and capabilities in the upcoming new version of Office 2010.

Hat tip to Arpan Shah who has a great post with his top Office 2010 Tech Preview Features.

One of things I am working on is building a business case from the business perspective on migrating from older versions of Office to Office 2010. I know the business case is there but would love your feedback and help to start identifying business scenarios and the potential ROI from a business user perspective which would benefit from the Office 2007 and new Office 2010 features.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Office2010

AIIM Webinar: SharePoint and Your Information Infrastructure

I was the speaker for this webinar last week with AIIM and EMC. Here is the synopsis:

On the surface, implementing SharePoint as an enterprise content management solution seems simple and straightforward. After all, pop in your disk and, voila, SharePoint is installed. Yet, like every other single piece of information technology, deciding the proper role for SharePoint in your organization becomes complicated. Fast. How do you determine the role that SharePoint can play in your ECM strategy? We’re here to help.

SharePoint can, and will, play a key role in many organizations’ enterprise content management strategy. However, other than for some smaller companies, SharePoint is not an ECM infrastructure in and of itself; it needs to integrate with and be extended by other products for issues such as compliance, storage management, document imaging, etc. Discover how to leverage the capabilities of both SharePoint and ECM tools, including issues around interoperability. We’ll conclude with a look at potential return on investment.

To view the archived event click HERE. Hope you find it useful.

Technorati Tags: MOSS 2007,ECM,AIIM,SharePoint

sharepointgovernance.org Launches

There is a new destination for those looking for SharePoint governance best practices and lessons learned from those of us in the trenches implementing SharePoint.

Check it out at: www.sharepointgovernance.org

I am pleased that I was asked to be one of the  peers on the site and look forward to sharing some of the lessons and best practices we have developed. I also look forward to learning form other peers and the “gurus” about how best to leverage SharePoint for managing information effectively.

What is a Common Information Infrastructure?

A Common Information Infrastructure (CII) is a set of interoperable information management technologies along with common enterprise-wide standards, associated business processes, support and governance models, and enterprise-wide technical architectures. Phew! That is a mouthful!

The resulting environment provides the common framework required to ensure that system use aligns with organizational priorities and streamlines document and records management and collaboration efforts across the organization. This is not an application that is installed on some giant server in the the sky. Moving to a CII becomes a strategy and involves the journey to migrate from current reality to the future CII realization along with defining and providing services and support to the consumers and customers of the CII.

The primary characteristic of the CII is the ability to effectively manage electronic documents, electronic records, and other electronic information commonly referred to as unstructured data through their entire lifecycle. That lifecycle begins at creation or receipt and extends to the appropriate destruction at the end of that information asset’s life, based on business and compliance requirements.

The CII is not just technology but includes the necessary common processes and support models to effectively translate business requirements into information solutions by leveraging a consistent, predictable, and centrally managed set of technologies.

Typically the technical foundation of the CII will emerge based on the predominate technology deployed and in use within an enterprise. For many enterprises that technology will be Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, which is an integrated solution for managing the entire life cycle of different types of content, including documents, forms, images, email messages, instant messages, and more. Thanks to an intuitive user interface that integrates with common Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Office and Outlook, user acceptance and adoption should be high. This integration with familiar tools allows users to effectively manage information as an extension of their normal workload without having to significantly change the way they work.

In my next post I will discuss some of the dependencies and critical enablers for realizing the promise of moving to a Common Information Infrastructure.

With this post I wish all my readers a happy New Year and look forward to increasing the conversation about Better ECM in 2009.

Technorati Tags: ECM,SharePoint,MOSS 2007,Microsoft,CII,BetterECM

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