It's Conference Season!
A look at what's going on in the industry

Vendor user group conferences can become nothing more than commercials for the vendor products, but Pitney Bowes spent some time and effort to build an agenda that exposed its customers to industry experts in document technology and industry research. Presentations from Pitney Bowes’ own experts were intermingled with presentations from P.C. McGrew, EDP of McGrew + McDaniel Group, Kemal Carr of Madison Advisors and Jim Lundy of Gartner Group. There was also a panel hosted by Scott Gerschwer featuring three Gartner analysts discussing a number of information delivery topics.

The general themes for the conference included the development and understanding of Intelligent Documents, the technologies and methodologies surrounding return mail and mail that is Undeliverable as Addressed (UAA), and Document Production/Output Management as a function of the automated document factory.

By the end of the conference, the consensus of the customers was that they had benefited from the experience. They had a chance to share experiences with other users, get updated information on product and service directions from Pitney Bowes and learn more about the trends and influences that will impact the industry in both the near term and to the end of the decade.

The Pitney Bowes conference was followed the next week by three events: The Third Annual Dialogue User Group Conference in Lexington, Kentucky, hosted by Exstream Software and the co-located OnDemand/AIIM exhibition and conference as the Javitz Convention Center in New York City.

OnDemand & AIIM
OnDemand and AIIM came together for the first time this year, with adjoining exhibit floors. While the conference tracks were run separately, attendees benefited from the chance to see common keynotes and meet a wider set of vendors. Advanstar Communications, the producer for the show, says that this co-located event drove more than $15 million through the New York City economy.

The show opened with a flurry of activity. In this case, that included six inches of snow, which began falling mid-morning and kept coming down throughout the day. How much that changed attendance is hard to say, but there were airport closings, rail delays and other transportation problems for anyone trying to make it into the city on Monday morning. Those who didn’t make it into town for the show opening and the keynotes missed the presentation of the 2003 Isaiah Thomas Award to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman and publisher of the New York Times Company. RIT presents this award, which was sponsored this year by Xerox. Sulzberger could have simply said thank you and departed, but instead he delivered an acceptance speech that spoke to the information delivery industry with a clear understanding of the challenges of determining when to print and when to push digitally.

Sulzberger was followed by Charlie Pesko, managing director of CAP Ventures, the host for the conference portion of OnDemand. Last year in his keynote, he admonished the audience to recognize that paper was no longer the preferred medium of information delivery. This year, he reiterated his message saying, “Losing print jobs to local competition is not the problem. The issue is losing print jobs to other forms of business communication. Pages are moving to other output options because of underlying industry trends. This won’t change when the industry rebounds. It won’t be business as usual.”

The point was reiterated by the third keynote of the opening, U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) Deputy Chief of Staff Bob Tapella, standing in for Bruce James, the Public Printer of the United States. Mr. Tapella provided amazing insight into requirements placed on the Government Printing Office. In his new role, he will be responsible for developing a digital strategy for the GPO.

"The future belongs to those who can securely manage information content, repurpose that content for a variety of outputs and revolutionize the communications effectiveness of their customers' content," says Tapella. "Today, it's content that matters. Information managers must provide a complete solution for their customers to create, prepare and manage content for both print and online distribution."

The final segment of the keynote was the presentation of the one-millionth Fiery Controller to its buyer, Kinko’s. Selling 1 million of anything in our industry is a true milestone, and EFI has certainly been a technology leader.

Beyond opening keynotes, there were conference tracks hosted by AIIM and OnDemand, and there was the exhibit floor. For many attendees, there is as much education to be had on the show floor as in the sessions. The OnDemand side of the floor had a larger number of vendors and appeared to have more traffic each day than the AIIM side of the floor, which might suggest that commingling the vendors instead of segregating them would be a better idea.

Last year, we noted that there didn’t appear to be any paradigm-changing offerings on the floor and bemoaned the lack of attention paid to XML-compliant applications. This year, XML was everywhere you looked. While it is still unclear as to how and when XML will be integrated into document delivery workflows, vendors are stepping up to the table with offerings and enhancements that will allow them to offer a solution as the various industry verticals hit the need to exchange data in their infrastructures, which is where XML becomes a key player. Everyone from Document Sciences to Emtex, Exstream to PrintSoft, Group 1 and GMC Software had offerings to help compose, migrate, manage, ticket and enhance document development and delivery.

One interesting offering on the floor had nothing to do with document delivery, however. The folks at Captiva Software were introducing their new Digital Mailroom offering. They attracted a lot of attention, not so much from their offering as for their Segue People Mover, which exhibit staff were wheeling around the booth. We never heard who won the raffle, but it was certainly an interesting technology demonstration!

Dialogue User Group
At the same time OnDemand and AIIM were occupying Javitz, the Dialogue User Group took over the Embassy Suites in Lexington, Kentucky, for four days of seminars and education. The folks at Exstream Software crafted a program that covered the newest information on the Dialogue product, as well as user implementation presentations and sessions from industry experts.

The well-attended sessions in Lexington revealed that there are enterprises across the industry that have innovative approaches to their document creation and management issues. Many of them have taken the advice they have heard at industry conferences and implemented document strategies. AFLAC discussed their document library audit, which resulted in an 80% decrease in the number of documents they now use and maintain. That is an amazing feat for any organization!

This year’s spring conference season continued to demonstrate that there is a lot of expertise within the industry. Part of the challenge for all of use who participate is to continue to seek it out and learn from it.

Pat McGrew is a frequent contributor to "document" magazine. She is the co-founder of the McGrew+McDaniel group. For more information about conferences and industry events, visit our events page.