Getting a Bead on AIIM

by Doug Henschen

I came away from this year's AIIM Exhibition & Conference, held in early March in San Francisco, with a glass-half-full take on the state of the show and of the enterprise content management "industry." While the event wasn't as well attended as last year's show — and what show is these days — AIIM 2002 at least served its annual and indispensable purpose of bringing decision makers together for planning and reflection.

In truth, "enterprise content management" is an umbrella term for a loose-knit collection of vendors rather than a true industry, but the moniker seemed to stick at AIIM 2002. The Web content management players were actually using the "d" word, while former document management vendors had morphed (with varying sincerity and success) into content management players.

This year's buzz about Web services put me in mind of talk of XML at AIIM 2000. Back then, many vendors had signs declaring they had "XML Inside!" But it was hard to get solid detail on just what the XML was doing.

Similarly, many vendors reassured us this year that their code had been "Web services enabled," but I heard few coherent explanations of just how this would change the world.

Vignette was among the few with a lucid vision of Web services, and it helped that company executives were clear in casting enterprises, not vendors, as the would-be pioneers.

"This will enable a customer such as the State of New Mexico to support local agencies by deploying applications as Web services," explained Santi Pierini, Vignette's vice president of product strategy. "Local offices of, say, the Department of Taxation or the Department of Motor Vehicles could both take advantage of the same approval process for content contribution made available as a service through the larger state enterprise."

In the world of document imaging, Reynolds Bish, CEO of Captiva Software, long ago predicted that the document capture and forms processing markets would converge and consolidate, but I doubt he envisioned the merger of Captiva and ActionPoint, which was announced at AIIM but had yet to be finalized. Bish, who would become CEO of the merged company, told Transform that the marriage would bring opportunity rather than consolidation.

"When you look at our respective customer lists, there's little or no overlap," he noted. "95 percent of ActionPoint's customers are focused on document capture, while 95 percent of our customers are focused on forms processing."

At AIIM 2002 we saw further evidence of a number of trends we've been reporting on, including distributed capture, but we spent most of our time looking at new products and technologies. Our annual take on the Best of AIIM brings together more than a dozen examples of technology that will improve the way you do business.

Doug Henschen, Editor-in-Chief

Send questions or comments to dhenschen@cmp.com