AIIM Day 2

An amazing day.  Went by so fast.  We had a steady run of people coming by the booth, a lot busier than yesterday.  Good attendance for our theater presentation and the general session.  We had the ability to interact with CTOs, VPs and CIOs from all sorts of company's - ISVs that build solutions for these companies and press/analysts that cover the ECM space.  In addition to meeting with our partners, all of this made for an outstanding show.  Often I heard the comment:  "It is so great that Microsoft is at AIIM, it really validates how important the ECM space is to everyone".   It seems that we have three types of cusotmers:

- People who have never heard of XPS.   We give them the soup to nuts story about XPS, and I don't think there was a single customer that didn't get it and think that we had something that was very special.

- People who had heard of it, but knew very little.   Same as above - none of us found a single customer that did not find what we were doing very compeling.  Even the customers that came in with a "Microsot is doing a 'me-too' strategy" - they came away recognizing that we had a very unique approach and value proposition that is missing in the industry.  Really a great feeling for all of us that put together the show.

- People that knew a lot about XPS.  These people spent just as much time at the booth and presentations as anyone else.  They wanted to see the latest demos, which partners were building solutions and what customer reaction is to the format.

We centered our conversations with customers on three key values around XPS:

- Integration across Office, Sharepoint and Windows RMS.  In fact I think we really spent most of the time talking about RMS

- Platform - specifically, if you develop using .Net, we have full support for creating, managing, signing and protecting XPS and Office 2007 files using the .Net development platform.

- Security.  XPS is trustworty, no code or scripts, supports digital signatures and RM.  If you are concerned about secure documents, this is your solution.

Although there are a lot of other things about XPS, these three points kind of emerged during the last two days as the thing that really made people understand why XPS is different, and has unique customer value.

A few pics from the day:

Marcio giving a presentation

 

Kaushik presenting...

 

Me talking to customers at a booth (when the hands are moving like that, you know something amazing is being said).

Dinner at a Japanese restraunt somewhere around Chestnut and 2nd again.  This is a great little restraunt area in Philly (my first time in Philly) - if you are ever here, just jump in a cab and go to this area and find a place.  A lot better than walking out of the Mariott and trying to find a place to eat amoung the masses from the convention.

- Andy