Others attend Vendor or Industry specific conferences such as DIA, Liquent Horizons, QUMAS Connect, and so on.

Conferences such as AIIM, held by the Association for Enterprise Content Management (formerly the Association for Information and Image Management), are largely unknown to, and unattended by, this population.

Are Documentum professionals missing out on something? Up until now, I've thought no, but this year's agenda may be changing my mind.

Why? Look who the presenters and what the topics are:

Microsoft Enterprise Content Management for a People Ready Business
Using the Microsoft Office System to connect your People Ready Business
Extending Microsoft's ECM platform with Partner Solutions for a People Ready Business

Why "Engagement" Will Re-Define the Next Evolution in Workflow and Interactive Process Management

Expert attorneys will conduct the mock trial in real time with no scripts. You are the jury. Witnesses respond to questions extemporaneously in an adversarial situation. Real-time court rulings are based on a line of case law and a set of statutes and regulations.

Google Enterprise SuperSession:
Searching For A Better Way To Manage Content
Can people in your organization find the right content in your CMS? Can they even find the CMS? And if they know where to look, do they have any idea how to use it?

You have to admit, these companies have the potential and the power to make a bit of a bang as they enter the ECM World.

Now, I don't want to mislead anyone and say that EMC/Documentum isn't at the show, at all. They are an exhibitor and Documentum eRoom and BPM are scheduled to be awarded Best of Show on Tuesday. Given that, it's hard to believe AIIM wouldn't have invited someone from EMC to give a keynote speech or that EMC's submission to speak wouldn't have been accepted.

Maybe EMC thinks that their Software Solution Partners who are collaborating with their own client firms to make presentations will represent EMC well enough.

But John Newton, co-founder of Documentum and founder of Alfresco, isn't leaving it up to his customer to present in Alfresco's behalf- he's making a trip across the Atlantic to do so. And it's not as if this year’s AIIM conference is far from EMC's Hopkinton, Massachusetts headquarters, it is in Boston this year, not too far a hop from EMC's Massachusetts headquarters.

I'm doing a lot of talking and I'm not going to AIIM at all. Why? Because I wrote the conference off in 2000 when the world was talking about it was about Electronic Document and Content Management and AIIM was talking about Imaging and Scanning.

Now that AIIM is talking about ECM and the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Google are taking notice, shouldn't we?