Last week (2/9/09-2/13/09), speakTECH was an exhibiitor at the Drug Information Association (DIA) Conference in Philadelphia, PA.   The conference was a great success as both a networking / marketing opportunity and an educational event for all parties where a lot of vital information was exchanged and delivered.   Many major Life Sciences companies (including many of speakTECH's current customers), product partners, and other service and solution providers  from around the world were present at the conference.   This conference specifically focused on EDMS (Electronic Document Management Systems) in Life Sciences. 

speakTECH had an opportunity to talk about the many solutions we have created in the Life Sciences/Pharma space and showcase our productized service offerings and solutions such as the SharePoint Governance Kit - a solution offering that really spurred from our numerous implementations in the Life Sciences space based on the commmon business pains we saw in multi-matrix environments as they related to EDMS and SharePoint Governance.   As we  talked to Scientists and Researchers, Reg Ops managers, Publishing heads, IT managers and many other representatives on various subjects such as controlled SharePoint solutions, SharePoint/Documentum integrations, Validation Services, Scientist/Researcher networks, CRO (Contract Research Organization) - facing partnership applications, etc., the need of SharePoint Governance often surfaced, whether we were talking prospective, new, or existing customers of SharePoint.    

We  talked about our views on the need for SharePoint governance based on customer experiences, and we also demo'ed the SharePoint Governance Kit.  Many Life Sciences customer representatives were especially intrigued to find out about the site discovery capabilities.  As we know, Life Sciences companies are multi-matrix environments where the product development process spans across a multitude of departments and areas, resulting in information dispersed across many departmental-level sites and across intranets/extranets.  Furthermore, many outside parties such as agencies, CRO's and contracted drug manufcaturers, etc. are involved in the process; and, as a result customers might have information scattered across multiple site collections, farms, intranets/extranets.  Life Sciences customer were amazed when they found out that sites could be centrally provisioned, and site discovery services based on the metadata used when provisioning these site were available OOB with the kit  (discovery on the site level  is available in our kit - not OOB with SharePoint), and all of this was offered in a centralized manner.  We demo'ed how users could very quickly find the site they are looking for within a multitude of sites, and request access to a site they did not have access to.

The SharePoint Governance Kit was certainly an offering that caught the eye of many Life Sciences companies, and we will be following up with them to find out more about their specific governance needs.    If you are a Life Sciences company, please contact us and we'll be glad to help :-).   Look forward to writing more about how we have applied our governance offerings to Life Sciences in the near future and look forward to the next DIA conference in June 2009 in San Diego, CA.