Weather at the 2010 AIIM Expo + Conference: Partly Cloudy – Repost From AIIM ERM Expert Blog

This is a repost from my blog post on the AIIM ERM Community Expert Blog

For anyone who attended the 2010 AIIM expo + conference last week you had to wonder if this were really the “SharePoint Conference”. As I walked around the expo floor, besides the large SharePoint 2010 booth from Microsoft and large adjacent KnowledgeLake booth, almost every booth referred to SharePoint on their signs or signaled that their product or service offering supported SharePoint. Additionally, with an entire track (the SharePoint 2010 Summit) dedicated to SharePoint related topics one might wonder what the future holds for the AIIM expo + conference.

One thing surprising to me was the way Microsoft chose to configure their booth with only an “experience classroom” and partner pavilion. They did not have any Microsoft manned stations to highlight, discuss, and demonstrate how SharePoint 2010 supported ECM and records management in a much deeper way with the upcoming release. Another surprising omission was lack of promotion for Microsoft’s cloud Software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). I would have though Microsoft would have really focused on BPOS as an offering to take advantage of the interest in cloud computing offerings.

The cloudiest vendor was SpringCM. This SaaS vendor was completely focused on Cloud as the answer to fast and easy deployment of ECM. Their offering sounds pretty compelling but I wonder how this offering play with large global enterprises that have a significant investment in SharePoint or some other ECM solution like Documentum or Livelink. I think SpringCM has a window of opportunity but will start bumping up against the Microsoft BPOS offering when Microsoft releases the SharePoint 2010 version of BPOS.

I did not see any other vendors who really talked about a credible cloud based offerings (delivered in a “pay-per-use and self-service way” as defined in my previous post) on the exposition floor. Alfresco points to hosting partners which provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for hosting Alfresco “in the cloud” but after a quick look at the partner sites it looks like most are really just providing off premise hosting for an Alfresco implementations as opposed to a true pay-per-use cloud offering.

I attended the keynote session entitled “Reinvent Work, Collaboration, and Innovation in the 21st Century” by Google’s Cyrus Mistry. I was somewhat disappointed since his talk really did not focus on leveraging the Cloud to transform how businesses manage information. He really focused more on how Google is using Gmail and Google Apps to create a culture of information sharing which is a very laudable goal.

What was disappointing was Cyrus’ recommendation “not to waste time” deciding which files to keep and which to delete and to just keep everything. Just because storage is getting cheaper and for Google the solution to any search problem is Google Search does not relieve organization from sound records management accountability. James Watson’s recent post on the AIIM ERM Community talks about the rationale for appropriately deleting unneeded content regularly. I think the folks at Google should read the blogs and Wikis at the AIIM ERM Community regularly.

Until next year…

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