I’m blogging from the show floor of DIA EDM 2011 - the Electronic Document Management event held by the Drug Information Association - in windy and cool (but snow-less) National Harbor, Maryland. Held in the glamorous Gaylord National Convention Centre (right) just outside of Washington, DC, the event kicked off today with a full contingent of vendors – many of the same faces along with some new ones such as Veeva Systems (cloud-based business solutions for life sciences).
The current count is 42 vendors, many of whom are partners of Adlib’s – such as LORENZ Life Sciences, MasterControl, Nextdocs and ISI (the latter is now CSC after a recent acquisition).
Attendance at this year’s event, which has the theme of “the Intersection of Data, Documents and Submissions,” seems to be lower than past years, but still more than 250 attendees from leading enterprises were present today.
Microsoft SharePoint remains a key area of interest for people in the pharmaceutical industry, if conversations and presentations at DIA EDM are any indication. Meeting the strict requirements of Big Pharma is a challenge, but many enterprises seem to feel that SharePoint is up to the task.
The importance of third-party components (such as Adlib) and deliberate planning were key themes of the early sessions run today by Amgen, EMC, and Focused Consulting. Adlib’s relationship with Microsoft and, more specifically, our integration with SharePoint, helps organizations address their publishing challenges.
Metadata is another pervasive theme at DIA EDM 2011 - using metadata to facilitate internal access and process flow, in part because there is increased litigation focus on having complete and comprehensive metadata in all of one’s documents. The discussion is even broader: metadata as beyond document properties including full audit details about who created, accessed and/or modified the document – including full version history and any other contextual information related to the document lifecycle.
I’m looking forward to hearing more about the current state of the industry from the ‘front line’ here at DIA. (Here I am, with fellow Adlibber Howard Coles, at the Adlib booth #400 on the show floor today.)
