April 19-22 marked my annual trek to Philadephia (or Boston some years ago) for the annual AIIM Standards Week and AIIM 2010 Conference and Expo. As a bonus, this year the Expo was again co-located with the OnDemand Conference and Expo. While AIIM is focused on getting everything in the world off of paper and into electronic (or microfilm/microfiche) formats, OnDemand is focused on printing. Having spent more than a decade working on the Microsoft Publisher team, and having worked in print houses a lifetime before that, I still have enough printer ink running through my veins that I love visiting the OnDemand end of the showroom floor.

I mean really, who could not love a toy like this?

Okay, so not, perhaps, the most environmentally friendly toy. But I’m sure that’s 100% recycled paper on that roll, or at least I hope it is.

Standards meetings got off to a start while booths were being set up on Monday the 19^th. First the AIIM Standards Board met. Atle Skjekkeland, VP for AIIM Internation, gave a demo of the new AIIM communities website, which rolled out with two prepopulated communities that include blog posts, a wiki for each, discussion boards, buyers guides and more. There was a lot of discussion around getting everyone on the Board involved in adding to the discussions and the wiki entries, setting up a Standards community in the near future. After Atle’s presentation we talked about something that’s really been bugging me: the whole web 2.0/enterprise 2.0/whatever 2.0 label.

It seems like we’ve been using that label for a long, long time now. If we aren’t already there, hasn’t v2.0 passed us all by? The outcome of the discussion was that the Board encouraged the AIIM administrators to rethink the label and be more forward thinking. Go beyond the 2.0 label. Not necessarily to 3.0, but to whatever comes next, without creating a self-limiting structure for the next steps.

Most of the rest of the Standards Board meeting was report outs from various committees and from the latest Board of Directors meetings. Not too exciting. But there was one especially cool report out from the iECM committee. One of the highlights of the AIIM 2010 Expo was a multi-vendor demo of CMIS, which was, at the time, about to become an OASIS standard (and did achieve standard status last week). The iECM committee still has the online demo available if you’d like to check it out.

We also had a meeting of the US TAG (technical advisory group) to ISO TC171 that first day.  We have a meeting scheduled for the full TC in mid-June, and because many of the AIIM 2010 international participants were unable to travel to the US for the conference, most of the TAG meeting was used to discuss plans for volcano avoidance. Well, really it was used to discuss contingency plans for ensuring we get the right people to meetings since we'll be missing a few due to shortages on travel funding from some companies, but we did talk a lot about a certain Icelandic volcano as well. If it takes three boats and a train, I plan to be in Paris in June. Hey, it’s Paris. In June. Paris.

Tuesday’s standards meetings included an interesting ad hoc gathering to discuss document life cycle, retention, and archiving issues. The result of the discussion was an outline for a multi-part technical report that we plan to propose to AIIM/ANSI in the near future. The TR will include everything from what to consider before you create your documents, to how to handle existing paper documents, what formats are appropriate for which type of reuse, what issues to consider for using documents in the future, how to plan for accessibility, what to expect and plan for around failure rates in document conversion, and a dozen other issues that crop up when folks start working on creating document archives or libraries. It’s a very fraught issue, and we had several people in the room who had been through very painful experiences, as well as several solution providers. We’ve broken the work into several smaller sub-groups, and it will be interesting to see how the work progresses over the next several weeks.

I had a chance to visit the showroom floor Tuesday afternoon. I spent some time wandering through the booths on both the AIIM and OnDemand ends of the floor. The SharePoint folks were getting ready for the CMIS demo the next day, so weren’t too busy yet in their booth.

The partner plaza right next to them was hopping, however.

I had stopped by earlier to talk to Duff Johnson, Chair of the US TAG to PDF/UA, in the Appligent Document Solutions booth, but when I went back with my camera in hand, he was gone already. Instead I found Mark and Virgina Gavin, CTO and Owner of Appligent Document Solutions.

Mark (center) is also a member of the PDF/UA committee, as well as the PDF Reference and maybe the PDF/A committee too.

Tuesday was also the night we all got to dress up and see Duff be presented with a Distinguished Contribution award from AIIM at the annual awards dinner. You can see pictures from the event and the list of award winners on John Mancini’s blog (John is the President of AIIM). We had the pleasure that evening of the company of Gerard Cathouly, the Chair of TC171. Gerard had been in D.C. for meetings the previous week, and thanks to the aforementioned volcano, had time to spend with us in Philly.

Wednesday was a long, busy day with the PDF/UA US TAG. We had not only the US participants, but a guest from the Canadian  committee as well. Ferass Elrayes from NetCentric, who has been a part of the PDF/UA effort since its earliest days and is currently our only Canadian representative, joined us to discuss several outstanding issues in the current CD of ISO 14289. We also had guests in the morning from the Adobe Live Cycle team in Ottawa, who took us on an odyssey through XFA, with several very helpful demos and a good question and answer session. We were able to resolve one of the open issues and come up with a US proposal to take to Paris. We also worked through many other comments on the CD to determine the US position on those comments.

One of the terrific things about the location of the AIIM Expo and Standards Week the last couple of years is that the Philadelphia Convention Center is located next to and over the top of the Reading Terminal Market. In addition to being fun to explore, the Market’s location makes it a great convenience for grabbing a sandwich during a meeting. On the way back that day, I stopped at a pastry booth run by Amish women thinking I’d grab something for everyone for dessert. Three éclairs the size of small children were more than enough to feed the entire room. Yikes!

After our working lunch, we managed to wrap up the PDF/UA committee work, finalize the preparation for Paris, and decide on our recommended outcomes from Paris. We have a good group going for the meetings there, and I’m looking forward to a positive outcome from those meetings. One more short CD, then onto DIS, we hope.

No good conference should end without a truly fabulous meal at the end of a fabulous day. Ferass enticed several of us out to a terrific tapas place called Amada. Their most recent claim to fame, I understand, is that the chef, Jose Garces, is the newest Iron Chef America. A title well-deserved if the repast that night was anything to go by. We let the chef choose the menu, ordered a couple of pitchers of sangria, and enjoyed. The food was marvelous, the company great (though we lost a couple of the partygoers to another event part way through), and it was just the right note to end several days of meetings.