The 35th anniversary conference of the Nuclear Information & Records Management Association (NIRMA) – held with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) kicked off with some great presentations on SharePoint, ECM for Engineering and great all around discussions with customers. (ECM in general provides a lot of general capabilities, but ECM for Engineering is specific to meeting the compliance and regulatory requirements around records management, transmittals and procedure steps.)

This being my second time attending NIRMA, I’ve re-connected with many people from last year as well as met a lot of new contacts. This conference is designed to be a collaborative and engaging event; all presentations are not vendor specific, which means you focus on the core issues the nuclear industry faces.

The Adlib presentation yesterday, held jointly with our partner, Sword CTSpace, titled “Tips and Techniques for Automating the PDF Rendition Process,” was very well received. We started off by presenting some of the challenges we’re currently aware of when it comes to renditions. Typical issues include:

• Too many rendition solutions
• No consistency in the output because of having so many different solutions
• Lack of confidence in fidelity of the output
• Performance related issues

We then opened up the floor to hear specific rendition problems the audience was having; we had hands going up and people were engaged. The outcome of the presentation is that people walked away understanding some of the basic ideas needed in order to work towards a successful Enterprise Content Transformation solution. I’d like to thank Tim Fleet, an engineer with SwordCTSpace, for giving us the opportunity to co-present; it was a great conversation with the members of NIRMA.