The End of an Era – and the Beginning of Another… [I'll be on vacation for the last week of July and first week of August. While I'm gone, I thought I would reshare some of our more popular blog posts from earlier this year.] [Note...for a summary of who we are and why we do what we do in the wake of the end of our run with the "AIIM" label on the Questex show - see this post.] The Info360 event taking place from March 21 – 24 in Washington, DC will be the final “AIIM” Show to bear the AIIM name. This is the culminating activity of an evolutionary course we began 10 years ago when we sold the event (known as the AIIM International Exposition and Conference) to Advanstar/Questex. It also marks the successful transition to the Info360 name for the event, a transition initiated by Questex 3 years ago. Our action at that time was based on the belief that: a) large scale horizontal trade shows were changing rapidly; and b) so too was our industry. We believe that the past decade has borne out the foresight of AIIM and our Board of Directors from…

Like many of you, I have waited for a long time for Google to enter the social realm. Well, they’re in it now, and it’s called Google+. The first question to be answered before moving on to thinking about the implications is What the hell is Google+ and why should I care? Here are a few articles to get the basics… Google Plus and the Social Media Moonshot How Google+ Stacks Up Against Facebook Google+: First Impressions Google+ a clean, intuitive mobile experience so far So with that as background, here are my initial impressions about Google+, particularly in the context of associations. In thinking about this, I asked 60 early Google+ users for their impressions, and those are reflected in the data that follows. 1 — Google+ appears to be winning the PR battle with Facebook. Based on a very superficial level of usage so far, I am stunned at how receptive my little set of early adopters are to throwing Facebook under the train. Here was the question I asked…Based on what you know right now or have heard, how do you think Google+ compares with Facebook relative to the following…(% indicating Google+ better among active Google+ users)…

8 reasons why 2011 will be the year of CMIS [I'll be on vacation for the last week of July and first week of August. While I'm gone, I thought I would reshare some of our more popular blog posts from earlier this year.] In December 2009 I published an article explaining 8 reasons why CMIS will transform the ECM industry (http://aiim.typepad.com/aiim_blog/2009/12/8-reasons-why-cmis-will-transform-the-ecm-industry.html ). In May 2010 the initial version of the CMIS standard was released by OASIS. In the last few months I have been asked by several people of what my opinion is now, looking back at my thought-provoking predictions that I made in this article one year previously. So it’s time for me to reflect on these statements and to state 8 reasons why 2011 will be the year of CMIS: 1 — CMIS is the SQL for Content Management. I’m still convinced that CMIS will have a similar effect on the ECM market in the same way SQL did on the database market 30 years ago. Some people criticize that up until today SQL hasn’t been a perfect standard and that it is still quite tricky to build portable SQL applications. That’s true, but the standardization of…

Email mail sucks. Let’s move on. [I'll be on vacation for the last week of July and first week of August. While I'm gone, I thought I would reshare some of our more popular blog posts from earlier this year.] One of the things I find interesting when I have conversations about the potential business impact of social technologies is the business person who says something like, “I have too much information coming at me right now. And besides, we already have a way for people to connect together and it works perfectly well and it’s called email.” It seems to me that email mostly gets a free pass when it comes to productivity and whether it actually performs the purposes for which it was originally intended. I decided to take a look at my own email stats for the past three business days to get an idea of how “productive” email is. Keep in mind that I have tried over the past year or so to move as much as possible OFF of email (e.g., email newsletters and the like), but some continues to creep in. Here is my data… So there you have it. We started out with…