I’ve been to a lot of ECM conferences and a lot of SharePoint conferences over the past years.  At the ECM conferences, SharePoint is covered by 15-25% of the sessions, and at the SharePoint conferences, ECM is covered by about 20% of the sessions. 

Wouldn’t it be great if one could attend a conference that was all about SharePoint and ECM, combined?  What kind of networking and learning could happen?

For this reason, I was pleased to learn about the ECMSharePoint ‘08 conference, being held in Orlando, Florida, on Nov 17-19.

This is a conference with keynotes from Raymond James Financial, one of the largest SharePoint ECM implementations, and from Microsoft (of course). 

The presenters make up the cream of the crop of SharePoint ECM partners.  A full list of the presenters is here.  AvePoint, BlueThread, ImageSource, KnowledgeLake, and Rosetta are some of the partners that I’m familiar with, and I’m looking forward to getting to know the others.

Some questions that the presentations will answer:

  • Is SharePoint really as capable as anything else for ECM applications?  What does it do that other applications cannot?  What are its strengths and weaknesses?
  • Does SharePoint really perform document management? Is it as capable as other products on the market?
  • Can ECM on SharePoint save us money?   Can it lower our operating cost, or will it cost more in the long run?
  • How hard is it to migrate, and what do I give up or gain when I do?
  • How does SharePoint deal with records management and compliance? We see nothing in the product information about it –  how are others doing it?
  • Can SharePoint scale to grow with your ECM application?
  • How many users can you really support on SharePoint? Is there a limit? What is the cost?
  • Does SharePoint simplify distributed capture? Does it allow me to lower the cost of capture?
  • What are the true advantages and disadvantages of SharePoint?

There will be plenty of networking, with evening receptions on both Monday and Tuesday nights.  The best thing is, that almost everyone who will be there will be focused on SharePoint and ECM, so it will be a rich networking event.

Everyone should register!   See you there!