AIIM, the global community of information professionals, announced the winners of the 2012 Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Awards last night in a gala celebration coinciding with the AIIM Conference 2012 taking place at the Grand Hyatt San Francisco. The Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award was established to recognize excellence in the area of information management. "Best practice" denotes a standard of excellence that has been achieved with an organization and refers to a process that can be quantified, adapted and repeated.

Industry Leader OpenText Teams Up with AIIM to Expand Global Reach and Adoption of AIIM’s Information Professional Certification Program. AIIM, the global community of information professionals, today announced a critical milestone in the evolution of AIIM’s Certified Information Professional (CIP) program. With the formation of a new CIP Champions program, AIIM is addressing the changing role of the information professional and recognizing content and information management solution providers who are committed to the CIP designation as part of their employee and partner education programs.

AIIM, the global community of information professionals, today announced the first training partner for AIIM’s Certified Information Professional (CIP) program. "This represents a critical milestone in our ability to develop and deliver workshops focused on CIP exam preparation," said John Mancini, AIIM president. "As the first approved member of our Training Partner Program, Strait and Associates will continue to work with AIIM to define training solutions that enable information professionals’ success."

AIIM’s New Focus on People and Professional Development is Embraced by the Global Community. AIIM, the global community of information professionals, today announced the arrival of 670 information professionals, from 25 countries, at a sold out AIIM Conference 2012. Plans are underway for a larger venue in 2013 due to the success of this year’s conference reaching capacity 30 days prior to the program date.

Leverage and manage your critical document assets across the extended enterprise. Crawford Technologies’ goal at the AIIM Conference 2012 is to educate and forge new relationships in the ECM industry. The Archive Management Solutions division of Crawford Technologies is positioned to help customers manage their critical document assets across the extended enterprise. By adding additional value to existing ECM systems or migrating customers to new, more powerful ECM systems we offer our customers the ability to efficiently take advantage of valuable information contained in their document assets.

Streamlines Paper Processes by Employing an Image and Text-Based Approach to Automatically Recognize Scanned, Faxed and Digitized Pages and Capture Embedded Data. NovoDynamics, a leading developer of optical character recognition (OCR) and pattern recognition technologies, today announced the release of NovoDocufier™, its new Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) software solution.

AnyDoc Software’s document processing and classification engine, Infiniworx® will demonstrate its email processing functionality to automatically process incoming emails and attachments. Infiniworx recognizes and opens the email attachments, sending them through its advanced document classification to prioritize, sort, and route them for further processing downstream.

AIIM, the global community of information professionals, is pleased to announce the 2012 winners in three of its industry award categories. Recipients will be recognized for their outstanding achievements and receive their awards at the AIIM Awards Celebration on Wednesday, March 21 at The City Club in San Francisco in conjunction with the AIIM Conference 2012.

Next month, I’ll be in San Francisco for the AIIM conference, invited by the brilliant Laurence Hart to participate in a panel with some fellow ECM practitioners from more traditional ECM providers as well as from emerging cloud-based services.

While the cloud can be liberating, like any tool it needs to be understood in the context of your overall business strategy.