Aquaforest at the AIIM Roadshow

Five members of the Aquaforest Team attended the AIIM Roadshow 2012 on 21st June 2012 at the Hilton Metropole Hotel in London. For those of you who are not au fait, AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) “is a global, non-profit organization that provides independent research, education and certification programs to  information professionals”.

One of the main focuses of the AIIM Roadshow 2012 was to present the latest innovations in information and document management systems as well as to provide practical guidance and best practices in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) so as to help organizations optimize their business processes, improve their services and keep up with their competitors while saving money at the same time.

The event started with the president of AIIM, John Mancini, addressing the delegates with his vision about Information Management. He stressed that the world is revolving around information which is growing exponentially. Consequently, there is a serious need to put robust and stable systems to deal with these information growths. This set a really good tone to what was expected of the Roadshow.

The event continued with series of focused roundtable and case study sessions throughout the day – providing a platform for learning, discussing and comparing how best to manage our information and implement best practice across the industry. However, it was disappointing that the sessions we attended focused more on companies trying to sell their products rather than imparting knowledge and discussing about how the industry could be developed.

It was no surprise that SharePoint occupied most of the agenda seeing as it is currently the most popular content management software in the market (and also most of the case studies were presented by companies who were partners of Microsoft).

The closing keynote presented by Alan Pelz-Sharpe, an independent researcher with no affiliations to any companies, gave a very good critical review about the use of ECM software by organizations. He argued that companies should not just “jump on the bandwagon” and use SharePoint just because it is a well-known software that everyone is using, when their companies may not really need it.

Overall the event provided a unique opportunity and platform to network with some of our customers and potential business partners. Some of our team along with Our Head of German Accounts, Steffen Kretzschmar took the opportunity to meet with iRIS with whom we work very closely;  we currently use iRIS’s OCR engine in our Extended OCR module for Autobahn DX module: autobahnxocr.asp

On a final note, we would like to report back too that we enjoyed an excellent lunch and the hospitality as always was exemplary.