2015 Mid Year Summary

Here is my Mid Year Summary from the AIIM Communities. I feel like there is a lot happening, particularly in the Microsoft ECM ecosystem right now.

ECM in the context of Microsoft Announcements

Here is an update on the future of ECM in the context of the Microsoft announcements at Ignite and other recent events.

ECM – Q1 Update

Here is my review of the ECM Market in Q1.

Pi Day

At 9:26:53 AM this morning, the date and time are the same as the first 10 digits of Pi. (3.141592653) Not the Life of Pi, which was a great movie (see “Richard Parker”), and a book our kids read in middle school, but the constant that represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Once I knew at least 4 ways to calculate this precisely, to any level of detail, those days have faded.

2015 Crystal Ball from a SharePoint of View

Here is my 2015 Forecast from the AIIM Communities.

2014 ARMA Conference Trip Report

Here is my report from the 2014 ARMA Conference in San Diego.

8 Things to Know about Moving from SharePoint On-Premise to Office 365

Here is a recent post on the issues and opportunities to consider in moving from SharePoint on-premise to Office 365. 

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference

Here is a trip report describing my recent visit to the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington DC. 

Congratulations Chris Beckett

This week, I attended the Regional Ernst & Young Entrepreneur event. I was a winner in 2008, and this was the only thing in my whole career that my mother understood. She celebrated and was proud of me, but she told her friends that I was an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

I taught a course in Internet Applications and Infrastructure as an Adjunct Professor at the Jesse Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University from 2000-2002. Eventually, I decided that the students were so smart and I didn’t have time to prepare an entirely new set of material every year (because my subject area was changing so rapidly) so I quit doing this. My last and best year included several students who worked hard on their projects and were great students in every way.

This year, one of them, Chris Beckett, CEO of Pacific Drilling, won the E&Y award on his third nomination. This is worth celebrating for him and I am proud as a teacher/mentor as well

AIIM 2014 Trip Report

I went to the AIIM Conference this week in Orlando. While the format is very different than the big AIIM Shows in the 90’s and 00’s, many of the themes were the same. AIIM Still focuses on Content Governance, it is just that there are so many more repositories and channels of communication than their used to be. The best of the vendors were out in force to leverage these themes.

The format is challenging, but rewarding. Instead of the traditional hour-long sessions, these sessions are half an hour. This causes the speakers to really focus on their message, to the benefit of the audience, I thought. The audience was high level and engaged. This is not a technical audience, it is a leadership audience and they are asking penetrating questions.

The AIIM staff are really committed to living up to the standards of their history. They are supporting many constituencies, and trying hard to help people. That is a refreshing dimension of AIIM. John Mancini, the AIIM President, has done a masterful job over the last 20 years in keeping AIIM relevant. They have kept up with social, local, and mobile, while other associations have not stayed on the edge.

For me, AIIM represents something that is seldom seen in the MBA and consultant-driven world of ECM. It is an opportunity to participate to make our industry better, and in so doing, to enable people who are coming into the industry to have the same opportunities that we had. When my father retired from DuPont in 1982, many of the people he had worked with for 40 years flew into Parkersburg, West Virginia for his retirement. In the rapid hire-and-fire world of ECM and the Internet in the 1990’s and 2000’s, there is no more retirement from a position. If there is continuity in the ECM industry beyond the LinkedIn connections of an individual, it is in our industry association, AIIM. But, just as there is not much continuity of companies within ECM, likewise, there are great risks for associations such as AIIM. It takes people who know the industry and have experience guiding organizations through the ECM maze to help reposition AIIM to be successful.