Okay, so we didn't go to AIIM, but Russ Stalters, CTO of Applied Infornmation Services, Inc. and a recognized expert on Sharepoint solutions did. (In case his name sounds familiar, he was the president of TrueArc, which Documentum purchased in 2002.) Here's his reaction to Microsoft's keynote:

Microsoft Keynote at AIIM 2007 - Nothing New

post by Russ Stalters

I sat in on the keynote by Jeff Teper Corporate Vice President, Office Business Platform Microsoft e Business Platform Microsoft (which means SharePoint and all the SharePoint servers like Forms Server, Excel Server, etc.) this morning.

The session was entitled: From Business Intelligence to Blogs and Workflow to Wikis: Accelerating Both Empowerment and Governance in a Rapidly Expanding World of Information.

I did not find the session very enlightening. First, it seemed like I was attending a Microsoft session at a Microsoft hosted conference rather than an AIIM keynote. Second, the last 15 minutes were a demonstration of SharePoint no less. Hey, I might be harsh here but what I attended the session for was to hear the following:

Microsoft's vision of the ECM market going forward and where they intended to take the SharePoint platform for managing information. Yeah, I know, no forward looking statements, blah, blah, blah, blah. But still, there could have been a picture of what the long term vision was.
How Microsoft intends to participate in the ECM standards activities and the ECM market to help drive interoperability because those of us who have to make this stuff work know that large heterogeneous organizations will never standardize on a single platform.
How Microsoft intends to truly deliver Web 2.0 user experiences using the SharePoint platform. Arpan Shah did the demonstration, hinted at how SharePoint 2007 starts to provide some of these Web 2.0 capabilities, but the current version only went 30% of the way toward really embracing the true spirit of the Web 2.0 experience.
Overall, I was disappointed and wanting for more. Maybe next year there will be a hint about where Microsoft is headed for the future.

Technorati tags: ECM, Microsoft, MOSS2007, Web2.0, AIIM