ECM events

September this year sees an early start to the conference season, and I find myself first in the Netherlands and then off to India. As always I hope you can join me at one of these events. On the 17th September I will be in Utrecht to run a workshop on ECM & SharePoint at the HartmanEVENT 08, I keynoted at a predecessor to this in 2007 and very much look forward to the return visit. From there I head to Bangalore and Mumbai. First for the BT Summit in Bangalore on the 23/24th, where I will be talking about ECM & SOA, and E-mail Archiving, and running a workshop on ECM product selection - and then flying onto Mumbai for 26th for the Executive Edition of the event, where I will be providing a critical analysis of the current ECM marketplace.

I'll be running a two-day intensive ECM workshop in Rome this April, geared for the needs of project implementation and selection teams -- as well as the business managers who oversee information management initiatives. Our friends at Technology Transfer are organizing the event, and there are still a couple of places left. The dates are 10th & 11th April, so if the joint pleasures of a spring break in the middle of Rome along with a primer on content technologies appeal to you, then book up quickly, and feel free to e-mail me with questions in advance.

Autumn is conference season here in the US, and one of the events I am most looking forward to is KMWorld in San Jose, California, from 6-8th November. This year CMS Watch has organized The tuesday ECM conference track and we have some great sessions lined up, including market updates and discussions on building an ECM Strategy, along with some great speakers including our own Jarrod Gingras and our friend Anne Rockley. Added to this we are running a cool pre-conference workshop called when ECM meets Search on Monday. KMWorld is a special conference for me, as I have been attending since 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley, and the event never fails to attract many of the worlds finest thinkers and practitioners. I'm looking forward to the interactions and discussions that always occur and hope to see you there too.

The remainder of the event was very motivational. As the week went along, more and more people approached the Clearview booth, interested in learning more about ECM, how it can help their business, and how Clearview makes ECM relevant to the SharePoint community. It became very clear that this market—what I might refer to as the Microsoft SharePoint market—is rapidly developing and can provide a source of great ECM revenue growth and attachment for the foreseeable future. Submitted by Clearview Software

Enterprise records management (RM) has become one of the fastest-growing areas of ECM. The rush to implement new RM systems isn't hard to understand; new regulatory requirements, high storage costs, and the rising expense and complexity of evidence discovery in the event of litigation have made it increasingly vital to store the right content as records in the right way. Submitted by Interwoven

The ECM VARfest was an excellent event where document and content related resellers convene annually to network, understand changes occurring in the market, and learn how to better position their businesses to achieve future success. Submitted by Clearview Software

Many recent industry events have focused on the technologies or solutions areas that provide the best business opportunities for VARs. ECM continues to be counted as a top opportunity for solutions providers, with strong demand from several markets. According to Gartner, document imaging is among the top 10 CIO's technology priorities for 2007, and executives are projected to spend 3.6% more for ECM solutions this year. Used with permission from Business Solutions magazine

This past week I had the pleasure of keynoting at the DocTrain event in Indianapolis (held at the truly magnificent Union Station venue), and also running a small session on "How to procure Content Technologies." I have been running these small sessions for a long while now and they tend to prove very popular, and though I have been doing this for years, there are always new tricks to be added to the bag.At the end of this particular session I chatted with the head of a leading US ECM integrator (who wishes for good reason to remain anonymous!) who said he liked the session but would have added two key points. Never buy at the end of a quarter

I am just back from speaking at the very first ECM Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- an excellent event that left me with many things to ponder. Top of the list is the term ECM itself. You see, the attendees I met tended to view ECM as a new and emerging topic, and stated to me from the get-go that virtually "nobody does ECM in Asia". In fact person after person told me (to paraphrase), "In our organization we do document management, imaging, workflow, records management etc -- but we are not doing ECM --we have come here to learn about it"...So what was there for these Investment Banks, Islamic Banks, Insurance Firms, and so forth to learn about ECM? Well, first and foremost that they are only behind the West (if one can call it behind) in the adoption of the acronym ECM. Their usage of the core technologies is on a par, and I suspect in some cases ahead of most international peers.

On 17/18 October I will be hosting (along with Theresa) some round table discussions at the London Documation event. It's an interesting event in that rather than a podium and an attentive audience, the format is round table discussions with panels of experts. Its a real chance to interact, learn, and frankly argue a bit! The theme of our discussions will be: Open Source as a viable alternative for ECM? The business case for ECM Large scale ECM deployments - lessons learned I particularly like these kind of events as they give us an opportunity to interact, and be challenged -- it's a two way conversation. All three of the topics we know are hot with ECM Report buyers - if you are going to be there, please do come along and take part, and also say hello. This is one of the better educational ECM events, so we hope you can make it.