Blogs

We are proud and excited to embark on this next community. AIIM's origins are in imaging (AIIM was created as the National Microfilm Association) and Capture continues to be a core element of a successful information management strategy. After all, to set up a good scanning environment takes more - much more - than connecting a scanner to a PC to capture paper. (Just because you can buy a scanner at Best Buy doesn't make this easy.)

Capturing documents is the way to put your content in motion. The most basic value proposition of scanning paper remains that digitizing paper (or ingesting a digital document) ensures that you can find a document in seconds rather than minutes, hours, or never. Paper information doesn’t help your organization in today’s fast-paced world. While many internal company documents are born, and remain, digital throughout their lifecycle organizations still need to ingest a tremendous amount of paper-based communications from outside. Checks, application forms, customer letters, etc. all need to be turned into digital form for insertion into an electronic workflow.

Organizations that have implemented capture also report solid return-on-investment numbers. AIIM's latest Document Scanning and Capture Industry Watch reports that 46% of users report ROIs within 12 months, with two-thirds seeing returns within 18 months. These are consistent across many types of content and process.

Join us. Together we can create a remarkable resource to enable our community to capture documents and data as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Expert Bloggers
As with the ERM and Enterprise 2.0 communities, we have been fortunate to agree with a range of experts in the capture space who are willing to share their knowledge:

• Joe Budelli, VP, Sales, ABBYY USA and AIIM Board member
• Lisa Desautel, President, Graphic Image Services
• Bonnie Hipp, Senior Documentum Support Specialist, U of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
• Sanooj Kutty, Internal Consultant, National Health Insurance Company, Daman
• Dan O'Leary, VP, Global Solutions, LincWare
• Anthony Macciola, Chief Technology Officer, Kofax
• Kevin Neal, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Fujitsu
• Chris Riley, Sr ECM and Document Capture Architect, ShareSquared
• Jeff Shuey, Director of Business Development, Kodak
• Mike Wells, Lead Analyst, Information Systems Dept., Chesterfield County, VA
• Bob Zagami, General Manager, DataBank and past-Chair of AIIM's Board

Capture Buyer's Guide
Today, we launch with a Capture Buyer's Guide of software vendors. In the coming weeks, we will add hardware vendors and service bureaus too. If you're a vendor and we're missing you, drop me a line. For everyone who uses a product, we invite you to share your knowledge by rating and commenting on the products.

Capture Wiki
Here's where everyone can share their knowledge by contributing tips for what works around capture and collaborating to create best practices for all to share. We want your input to the wiki -- help us create a comprehensive resource for getting the most from capture tools, creating an effective strategy, etc.

What Do YOU Think?
Have a question? An opinion? This is your community. Use the Discussion tab to engage in debate or ask for help from fellow community members. Do you have an idea that you'd like to get off your chest or an opinion to share? Write a guest blog post (who knows, over time you may join our expert blogger line-up, Sanooj and Dan did).

If you ever have any ideas or suggestions, don't hesitate to share them openly or directly with me: bduhon@aiim.org.