The conference was quite nice and as expected, there was a good mix of people from users (academia and industry) and vendors. There were some very good presentations too.
One thing that struck me is that none of the top vendors have any differentiation from the other! I mean I know all products are different but after a 45 minute session by each, you can’t make out one from another because all of them speak the same things – talking about a unified content management strategy and the need to have a single repository. However, one of the vendors (Siva, Interwoven) was more honest when he said that “no one has an ECM problem, they either have a problem with web site or imaging or documents and so on…”. So even though they sell an ECM solution, they focus on individual components too. I guess this has also got to do with the current status of integration between different acquired products :).
The other thing that was a little too much was that all of them spent much of their time in exaggerating and convincing people that there’s huge amount of content and the problem is real and that they need to invest in ECM and blah blah…
On a side note, someone told me that in some libraries in India, manuscripts that were written on banana leaves have been preserved for 3000 years and are still in excellent condition. I wonder which unified repository can beat that 🙂
PS: I’ll post a copy of my paper on the blog in a couple of days.