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Here is what I saw related to records management at the AIIM Show in Philadelphia:

1. SharePoint 2010 was clearly in ascendance.  The ECM Suite competitors were either barely visible as ECM players or trumpeting their abilities in the SharePoint 2010 “embrace and extend SharePoint” camp.  This gave the AIIM Show a 1995 “best of breed” feel because Microsoft has not tried to aggregate the full set of capabilities for ECM and RM into a single platform.  There is much more of an opportunity to add value to SharePoint 2010 natively by adding scanning, or archival, or email management, or records management, or document assembly, or vertical applications as so many of their partners are doing. 
2. HP Tower finally demonstrated its SharePoint 2010 RM solution.  What I saw was an external blob storage integration with the HP Tower product that was integrated at a SharePoint site level by mapping SharePoint attributes to Tower records management attributes.  The traditional HP Tower physical records management functionality was implemented through SharePoint web parts to communicate with the HP Tower repository.  This is an advanced example of support for the records management of SharePoint content and physical records in a single system.  What I didn’t see was how this could be easily provisioned or governed in an organization that had, say, ten thousand sites all of which need to be similarly governed.   HP’s solution is very similar to the EMC SharePoint solution as implemented in the EMC Documentum Repository Services for SharePoint (EDRSS) product. 
3. File Trail had announced a product on the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Solution Gallery, so I was interested in reviewing their implementation.  They have implemented their product through the SharePoint 2010 Content Types.  This is critical because it ties their solution into the SharePoint Managed Metadata Service and Content Type Hub Service instead of tying it to the repository through web parts.  They didn’t have some of the space management and bar code management capabilities that define the high end of physical records management tools, but they seemed to have the API’s available for further integration. 
4. OmniRIM was in the Microsoft Partner Pavilion.  They have a SharePoint friendly solution, and they have done extensive work to synchronize their products with SharePoint 2010.  They integrate with the SharePoint Records Center by replicating the File Plan, Holds, and other metadata, and they have tied their search, email alerts and imaging functionality with SharePoint 2010.  They also provide large organizations with an integration to Iron Mountain for offsite box storage. 
5. Email records management has been identified as a gap in the Exchange 2010 platform.  There is not a well defined way to integrate the SharePoint 2010 records management capabilities with email messages in Exchange 2010.  As I understand it, this is a limitation of the product, and provides a significant opportunities for vendor partners to “embrace and extend” SharePoint and Exchange 2010 until the Office 15 generation emerges from product development. 

It was good to see a lively AIIM Show.  Philly was a fine venue.  The AIIM Banquet celebrated the achievements of a number of award recipients and the career of Ed Mackin.  It was nice to see him receive this award in his home town where he participated in establishing the William Penn Chapter of the National Micrographics Association, now known as AIIM, 40 years ago this August.