Tuesday, May 04, 2010 4:38 PM
by
loufranco
What I saw at AIIM 2010
The 2010 AIIM conference was a few weeks ago, and Atalasoft exhibited as usual. This is what I noticed:
- SharePoint: Last year, SharePoint was important at AIIM, this year it was dominant. There was some kind of SharePoint tie-in at nearly every booth. We were no exception, since we sell a SharePoint document management system. Not having a SharePoint story really made you stand out at AIIM (and not in a good way).
- Mobile: This shouldn’t be a surprise either. With the release of the iPad, it should now be obvious to everyone that document management is going mobile in a big way. We showed a prototype VizitMobile, a mobile Safari web application built with the help of DotImage, and gave away an iPad. I saw other iPad give-aways, and a few document management AppStore apps. This year mobile was nice-to-have -- next year, I expect it will be like this year’s SharePoint – no mobile story will mean no relevance.
- Where are the toolkit vendors?: Since this is my space, I really noticed that many toolkit vendors that I see at AIIM every year were not there. In imaging, all of the expected players were there, but ECM is more than just imaging. There are toolkits in all of the categories of ECM. Also, we go to AIIM partially because our customers go to AIIM – and they use other toolkits. There’s a lot of room to be the only ECM toolkit at AIIM in a lot of categories except imaging (which is crowded).
- CMIS, does anyone care? What if Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Alfresco, and OpenText release an interoperability standard and no one else supports it? The de-facto interoperability standard I see is SharePoint object model and web-parts. That isn’t good news if your name isn’t Microsoft. I specifically asked one of these vendors about connecting via CMIS – I think I was the first one ever.
In any case, it was a great show for us – we saw a lot of customers and partners, and it’s always a great place to get in-person reactions to what we’re doing. Looking forward to next year.