The party's over....

 

 Submitted by Bob Larrivee, AIIM Director/Industry Advisor

 

Well here we are, the week after AIIM 2010, the largest ECM focused event on the planet which was held in Philadelphia. As a new acquaintance of mine, Millie from West Philly put it, “you can see a lot of things here but what does it all mean?” Well Millie, you are right, we did all see a lot of things there and now it is time to digest what was seen and heard, try to make sense of it all and take that back to our organizations where it will be useful. I had a great opportunity to meet with several vendors who I felt had something different to say or show and will now try to present that here to you, hopefully doing it justice.

 

Kiosks were an interesting topic of discussion and while I heard of several, one was there and stood out in the Hyland Software booth that held the label of PFU Systems, a Fujitsu company. This device is designed for general access and the application shown by Hyland focused on public documents like land records. The kiosk and application can also manage payments was presented as being HIPAA and ADA compliant making placement more flexible. I had some experience with kiosks in the late 1990’s and while the concept was good, the culture was not ready. I think this is a winner and look forward to further adaptations where capture is extended through USB connected devices including scanners. Plustek also discussed use of kiosks in library environments and presented a full line of capture devices ranging from film scanners to scanners that bring audio to captured paper by leveraging text to speech capabilities. According to Mark Druziak, Director of Marketing, “Plustek offers a broad portfolio of specialty capture devices addressing a diverse array of formats supported by outstanding levels of customer service.”

 

Open Source and the “cloud” were topics to be found in a lot of discussions and this was no exception for Nuxeo and Digitech Systems. In the Open Source space, Cheryl McKinnon, Chief Marketing Officer of Nuxeo noted that “one of the challenges faced by many organizations is the flexibility and agility needed to link various applications together with their document management solution quickly, in order to accurately meet the information management and access needs of the organization. Nuxeo Studio provides this ability and is supported by one of the leading teams in the industry.” As for Digitech Systems, while they offer both on premise and hosted or SaaS models, they feel the levels of security, live support and increased focus on professional services to assist with integration efforts and a myriad of other services is a strong point for them. When asked what our readers should take away with them about Digitech, Sean Morris, Sales Director stated, “The Digitech SaaS offering, ImageSilo, combined with our world-class support, is the best business option available. We invite those seeking a solution to test us and find out for themselves.”    

 

In the land of recognition, Mobile was the buzz on the floor and ABBYY was at the forefront with a line of applications ranging from their business card reader which allows you to populate your phone contacts by taking a photo of a business card to ABBYY Lingvo Mobile multi-lingual dictionary for immediate translation and accurate pronunciation. Meanwhile at the CVision booth the focus was on speed referencing the ability to process up to 20 pages per second with capabilities of on the fly forms recognition all founded in over 50 years of experience. Entering the scene from Australia, David Wollstencroft of DocsCorp points out that “secure integrated workflow is essential to organizational efficiency and the ability to bring multiple output formats into a single point of access leveraging redaction and document comparison technologies is essential to the success of any organization. Recognizing this, we feel that education plays a strong role not only for our internal personnel but our clients and prospects as well.”

 

On the process automation front, Esther Apter, M Technologies CEO cited, “Today you cannot live without the tools and equipment for process management” as she coordinated a demonstration of the simplicity of the M Technologies mWorkFLOW offering using a simple dialog interface to create the various workflow scenarios for an organization.

 

In my view, while I cannot say there was any earth shattering or revolutionary unveilings this year, the underlying tone was one of focus toward increased flexibility, simplicity, and interoperability within the vendor community. I saw interesting evolutionary changes in the interfaces and the sense that emphasis is turning toward process centric implementations that enable single point of access and mobile access points to information of all types regardless of format and location. This in my opinion is a strong step forward and one that addresses the ever changing user landscape in a more direct way. Delivering the right information to the right people at the right time is what ECM is all about.

 

 What say you? Did you attend AIIM 2010 and see something you would like to share? Are you a patient who has fallen victim to a security breach? Do you have a story to tell? I want to hear from you.

 

Looking to learn more about intelligent information and process management?

 

Join us for the BPM Certificate course in:

San Francisco 05/25/10 - 05/28/10

 

Join us for the ECM Certificate course in:

San Diego 05/04/10 - 05/07/10

Denver 05/18/10 - 05/21/10

Calgary 05/25/10 - 05/28/10

Silver Spring 06/08/10 - 06/11/10

Houston 06/15/10 - 06/18/10

 

We look forward to seeing you there. Do you have several individuals who need training? Contact us to find out how a private class can save you on registration costs.

 

Bob Larrivee – AIIM blarrivee@aiim.org

Follow me on twitter – BobLarrivee and remember to visit www.aiim.org/training and www.informationzen.org, AIIM’s free social network created just for you.

Comments

[Ecm]

Great points on enterprise content management! Our company finally got an ECM software and it has made our day to day business processes much more efficent!