A look back at AIIM 2009

When I first walked into the Philadelphia convention center show this year, I have to admit I was a little taken back. In years past the joint AIIM/OnDemand expo was certainly much larger and decidedly louder. Gone are the book printers and roll fed devices demonstrating their might and churning out samples. Booths themselves were scaled back, and large product left behind in their place, brochures and posters. Staff was minimized as well, obviously a sign of the economic turmoil we find ourselves living in. Some vendors opted to go off the show floor and make use of meeting room space (Fujitsu), some opted out of the show altogether (Kodak). As a past attendee and exhibitor, I do remember foot traffic being heavier, however I also recall many demonstrations to clearly uninterested people who really just wanted the very cool pen, flashing ball, t-shirt, clock, calculator, sticky pad, USB stick or squishy thing we happened to be giving away. The vast majority of attendees of the past were casual lookers, somewhat buys, technofiles, and friends there to visit whatever cool city we were in. Attendees this year may have thought long and hard whether to attend, made a comittment to travel when many are not or cannot. Attendees this year were looking for solutions to either help them drive cost out of operations or understand ways these solutions can help them develop new business and grow existing. Attendees this year were more serious…maybe even more qualified than years past, the cool pen was an after thought. Read more »

No more MOSS – Microsoft SharePoint 2010!

Chris Capossela, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group, answered a Q/A today about Microsoft’s next generation of Office products. You can find the official release here and the corresponding explanation on the SharePoint team blog here.

Product Roadmap:

Exchange 2010 – entering beta today; available in 2H 2009
Office 2010 —”tech preview” in Q309; release to manufacturing in 1H 2010
SharePoint 2010 – no more “Office” branding

Other product hints from the interview: Read more »

Obama’s Plan: Focus on Healthcare, Part 2

In my last post, I discussed some recent research conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine regarding Electronic Health Record (EHR) solutions in light of President-elect Obama’s proposal to invest $50 billion in these technologies. In this post, I’d like to broaden the scope of the discussion to include market dynamics, Google’s and Microsoft’s roles, and what the future may hold. As before, you can access a more robust audio/PPT webinar, which also includes some discussion of enabling technologies.

(Webinar note: although I briefly mention the importance of back-file digitization strategies in deploying an EHR — including capture hardware and software — this element should not be understated. Healthcare remains a paper-intensive vertical market, and strategies for digitizing the paper-based information that will continue to be created are at least as important as capturing the mass of legacy documents that are already in existence.  To this end, InfoTrends perceives growth in distributed capture hardware and software, which allow these paper documents to be ingested by EHRs closer to their point of origin.)

There seem to be two somewhat-competing camps in the healthcare records space: Read more »

Obama’s Plan: Focus on Healthcare, Part 1

President-elect Obama has drawn considerable praise as well as stark criticism in recent weeks as details of his economic stimulus plans come to light. In this post, we’ll take a look at the Healthcare vertical in particular, where Mr. Obama has proposed spending “$50 billion over several years to accelerate the adoption of electronic medical records and other health information technology.” A solid analysis of the healthcare proposal is available here, courtesy of the Urban Institute. As with all things politics, the proposal itself will likely change before being ratified.

For those that haven’t followed the digital health revolution, I put together a Webinar overview of recent research from the New England Journal of Medicine and industry trends here (audio/PPT). Among other research findings: Read more »

“In 2 years, we won’t have laptops anymore”

Thus spoke Open Text CEO John Shackleton at the opening keynote for Open Text’s 2008 user conference, aptly named Content World. Those of you working with Open Text are likely more familiar with the “LiveLinkUp” event of the past, which was renamed this year to promote the ‘one voice, one vision’ theme. In line with this shift, I’ve found that a few product lines are moving towards a single-brand identity, with the (former) Red Dot Web content management (WCM) solution being referred to more often as WCM for LiveLink.

So maybe Mr. Shackleton is a little off in his perceived timing for this next evolution of information technology, and more than likely, this was a rhetorical statement. Then again, for those who saw InfoTrends’ President Jeff Hayes’ keynote at ODS, we all know “the cloud” and “mobile” are coming. Read more »

Do you have a “green” logo?

I was watching football on NBC last night and noticed the green peacock at the bottom-left corner of the screen. Since we’ve had a few inquiries in the past few months on the ‘green’ topic, I thought I’d do a quick image search for other green corporate logos. I don’t know that all of these are intended to be “eco” logos,  of course… green might just be a soothing new color that McDonalds is trying out versus that aggressive red/yellow contrast of the past. In any case, the connection between ‘green’ and ‘nature’ (or money?) could still be the culprit for these experimentations…Do you have a logo to add?

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Watch out for a detailed analysis on ‘green’ in the next month… we’re going to talk about influencers, regulations, what others are doing, and what they could and should be doing.

ODS Follow-up: Continuing our SharePoint conversations…

For those of you that attended our SharePoint keynote panel yesterday morning, I wanted to reach out and offer the opportunity to continue the conversation. Unfortunately, we ran a little bit over the allotted time and didn’t have the chance to address audience questions (nor several of my own). So that said, feel free to e-mail me directly, or post some questions/comments under this post. I’ll follow-up with our panel and post their responses here!

Based on what we heard during the keynote, it seems SharePoint could be a real disruptor for our markets and especially important as the convergence of hardware and software (and of workgroup and enterprise solutions) comes to fruition. The Microsoft ecosystem could be an ‘in’ for hardware manufacturers, workgroup ISVs, as well as enterprise ISVs to approach end-to-end solutions in a truly process-centric manner. Read more »