Herewith some random thoughts on the first half of the 3-day AIIM Conference & Expo in Boston, MA, USA.

Google

Day One opened with a double-headed keynote. The first speaker, New York Times consumer technology columnist David Pogue, spoke about how enterprise software vendors could learn from the consumer space, particularly by maintaining a ruthless attitude towards simplicity of design. Two of his more memorable quotes:

• If you improve software enough times you will ruin it
• Wizards don't make problems easier, they just makes them longer

 

He concluded with a broadway-inspired repertoire that you simply need to see for yourself some day. Kudos to the conference organizers for inviting him.

A Google exec, Matthew Glotzbach, followed Pogue on the stage and tried to bask in the simplicity glow. I actually thought Glotzbach's keynote (advertorial, really) was a bit, well, off-key. A low point came when the guy boasted that the documents he was editing online in front of the audience would survive a hard-drive crash because they resided in "the cloud." Perhaps unbeknownst to him (since he appeared to have an ethernet connection), the rest of us in the audience having trouble at that time connecting to the "cloud" via the conference center wireless service were probably grateful that any files we were editing resided in the firmament of our local hard drives.

SharePoint

Microsoft in general and SharePoint in particular seem to be a bit less present here than last year. It's not because the MOSS wave has crested (lots of people still asking us about MOSS on the show floor). Maybe it has to do with Redmond hosting a SharePoint conference on the exact same days.

WCM vendor Sitecore showing their wares in the Microsoft Partner Pavilion at the AIIM Expo.

Customers

We have a booth again this year, and the best part about that is meeting report buyers who stop by to say hello. This Expo is particularly nice in this regard because it attracts a more international audience than most North American conferences in this space, and we've met already customers from New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark.

It's great to hear about their technology projects, how they selected vendors, what was successful, and what wasn't. At a professional level, it's quite edifying. At a personal level, it's totally gratifying. Hope to see you somewhere, sometime, in the coming year.