Kalthoff Spring '97 conference highlights

Attendees at the Kalthoff International Spring '97 User Forum learned that the Web is alive, growing and going--into business. Held March 9-13 in San Francisco, the conference featured a variety of vendors, speakers and forums on engineering document management, product data management and Web infrastructure.

Kalthoff surveys indicate that PDM purchasing is up since October of 1996 and that 47% of survey respondents reported that they had active EDMS/PDM projects. Of those, 68% were in the process of purchasing or installing a system, and 52% were in the process of installing or upgrading a system. The statistics indicate the that the market for the products and services should continue to grow.

Attendees were offered over seventy seminar sessions, encompassing beginner- to expert-level course work, designed to meet the needs of a wide range of participants. Of special interest was Workgroup Technology's (Lexington, MA, http://www.workgroup.com) preview of a new approach to front-end product development that is designed to reduce product-to-market time and allow true real-time project tracking and process synchronization.