News and Events   William J. 'Bill' McCalpin is a frequent speaker in the electronic document industry, speaking at Xplor and AIIM global and local meetings, as well as at those of other associations and vendor user groups.   2008 AIIM In early March, Mr. McCalpin was invited to speak once again at AIIM International's annual international conference and exhibit. The session was entitled "The Vendors Speak: How NOT to Write Your RFP", an engaging look at the many ways that users write RFP that are garbled, erroneous, or just downright funny. More than 80 attendees came to listen to a change of pace; plenty of books and consultants will tell you how to write an RFP, but not very many will tell you how NOT to write it. Please see the session's PowerPoint at The Vendors Speak: How NOT to Write Your RFP! Xplor Document University (XDU) In early March, Xplor International co-located its 2008 annual conference at the AIIM/OnDemand conference and exhibit in Boston. At this year's conference, Mr. McCalpin, along with Bill Broddy and Michael Turton, presented the first formal Document Production Fundamentals course, as certified by Xplor International's Xplor Document University (XDU).  This course was the first course certified by Xplor to award Continuing Education Units (CEUs), based on an attendees satisfying attendance requirements and passing an exam. Although more than 60 attendees come to one or more sessions during the two day course, only 15 students satisfied the attendance requirements and the exam, thus becoming the first document professionals to ever earn CEUs from Xplor International.  Document Production Fundamentals and related courses are offered under the name of acadami; for more information, please see acadami's website at www.acadami.org . OnDemand As noted, AIIM and OnDemand have their conference and exhibits co-located each year; in 2008, this was in Boston. While at the conference, Mr. McCalpin was asked to chair a panel of industry analysts from Gartner, InfoTrends, and Forrester on the subject of several recent studies that the analyst groups had performed in the areas of Web-to-print, quick printing, and educational levels of employees in the electronic printing industry. The panel was sponsored by EDSF, a not-for-profit foundation for the electronic document space, that is strongly supported by MHE. Odyssey - Skywire Software User Group 'Odyssey' was the name given to Skywire Software's User Group meeting in 2008. Mr. McCalpin was asked to present a session on a subject that he has dealt with for years: "Presentation Issues on the Web". This session describes the issues that confront users from the transaction print world as they make the switch from traditional electronic printing to Web display. As Mr. McCalpin notes, in traditional electronic printing, the author had 100% control over the presentation, but in Internet display methodologies such as HTML and XML, the author shares control of the presentation with the reader, leading to issues that are unforeseen as documents no longer display correctly or as predicted. Note that the software business of Skywire Software was subsequently sold to Oracle, while the business process outsourcing business was subsequently sold to Kubra.  acadami As noted above, Document Production Fundamentals was done under the name of acadami. Since the Xplor XDU conference in March, acadami has presented a second course - Document Production Best Practices - at 7 locations in Canada and the US, and has had 59 attendees qualify for the one CEU course by satisfying the attendance requirements and passing the exam. In additional, acadami has repeated Document Production Fundamentals for the first time 'on the road' when it conducted this course at Seneca College's Markham campus in August. 10 more electronic document professionals passed the two-day course and qualified for the 2 CEUs authorized to be awarded by Xplor. For more information, please see acadami's website at www.acadami.org .