Records Management Users Dominate NIRMA Attendance

So here we are, Day 3 at the NIRMA 2010 conference in Las Vegas, and I haven’t had a chance to gamble a single dollar. Fortunately, the sessions held by the Nuclear Information and Records Management Association have been great, and the conversations with customers even better.  I’ve been helping to man the booth of Sword CTSpace, the leader in engineering content management software and a partner of Adlib’s.

The attendance at this show has about 90% records management business users and 10% IT administrators, which is fantastic for vendors to actually drill down into business problems and requirements.

PDF/A  is one of the top 3 topics for sessions at this event; NIRMA has had sessions on PDF/A for the last four years. One of this year’s presenters asked the question, “How many of you are storing your documents in PDF/A format currently?” and, surprisingly, only about five hands went up in a full room. Clearly, interest in PDF/A is growing within the nuclear industry, but I think people are cautious on the implementation strategy to make sure they do it right.

Tim Fleet, Products Director for Sword CTSpace – gave an introduction to cloud computing that was very well received by the nuclear users – giving them a sound understanding of what is happening in the IT world today, and planting seeds on how nuclear facilities will need to evolve in the future.

We’ve had numerous organizations come by the Sword booth. The idea of having centralized, server- based rendering embedded within the Sword’s document management system is enticing people to learn more.  We’ll definitely continue to leverage the PDF/A buzz to help move the nuclear industry forward in long-term archival strategies.