ACORD Forum 2009

Hi. Our team just returned from the ACORD forum this year held in Orlando Florida. Microsoft had a great presence at the forum and we showcased some fantastic industry solutions ranging from SharePoint (collaboration in insurance), Silverlight (next generation user experiences within in insurance), Surface (Life insurance Surface demo), Tellme, and Virtual Earth. More information can be obtained here, as well as a recap demo webcast that should be available at the end of June. https://www.microsoft.com/industry/financialservices/insurance/events/acord.mspx. We built a very slick demonstation of how insurance companies can build applications on the SharePoint platform leveraging the core SharePoint capabilities for a collaborative solution. The showcase scenario was a Life "new business" process where independent agents and brokers send ACORD 103 "new business" requests to a carrier, and process the human external and internal tasks using a SharePoint managed workflow. This demonstration showcases SharePoint, Silverlight, InfoPath Forms Services, Outlook/SharePoint integration, and Business Activity Monitoring (from BizTalk 2009). This demonstration will be available for viewing on the webcast linked above when it's available.

Chris Bertelsen, an architect from Protective Life, delivered a presentation how how Protective is leverage our software factory for ACORD standards (located here: https://www.codeplex.com/IVC) is being leveraged by his organization to enable internal and external interop scenarios. I also presented with Chris and showed a demonstration of the software factory as well as recent improvements. The video of the presentation can be downloaded here: https://www.acordlomaforum.org/2009/presentations/bertelsen.mov. Additionally, If you're interested in ACORD's new framework models, here's a great presentation from ACORD's Frank Neugebauer, https://www.acordlomaforum.org/2009/presentations/acord_framework.mov .

If anyone would like to watch a 9 minute overview of the ways Microsoft is working with the insurance industry, here's a great interview between ACORD, Bill Hartnett (Microsoft Insurance Director), and myself. Bill really communicates our message well. Select this link below and then scroll down to ISF 2009-Microsoft. : https://acord.a.mms.mavenapps.net/mms/rt/1/site/acord-pub01-live/current/launch.html?maven_playerId=videoacordorg1&maven_referralParentPlaylistId=17d30dc4a293d6f6a980d6a829c0595811628636&maven_referralPlaylistId=47e1c8880ecbeb35ace829fe6998d63d67b1630a&maven_referralObject=5460976

The core theme of our showcased technologies this year at ACORD was Cloud Computing. Everything we showed this year from SharePoint to Silverlight can run on premises or in the cloud with Microsoft Azure. Recently I did a webcast on Microsoft Azure to our ISV partners and its publically available here for anyone interested. https://mediadl.microsoft.com/MediaDL/WWW/I/industry/financialservices/livemeeting.wmv .