Last week I attended the UID Forum held in Orlando, Florida. Hard to believe it, but this is the 12th UID Forum that has been held since 2005 and Metalcraft has exhibited at every single one of them. 
Personally, I hadn't been to one since 2007 so I was pleasantly surprised at not only the sheer number of people - unofficially their largest one ever at over 1,000 attendees - but also at the maturity of the questions people were now asking. Yes, there were still some people who were new to the concept of UID - and that is to be expected. However, there were also those who realize they need to be UID compliant for compliance-sake, but also wanted to be able to use the data for their own purpose taking it "beyond compliance." Many of these people had been doing some form of asset tracking for their internal use and now want to tie it into UID. That's the great thing about databases - they can be tied together on the backend with a like field and in this case the like field can be the unique identifier. Used in this manner the asset tracking program provides more value to the user. Obviously this is not a new concept - it's not even the first time I have heard it at one of the forums. Usually, however, it is the vendor and/or presenter that is suggesting it. I think it is excellent that the users themselves are trying to incorporate this into their UID/asset management strategy. It truly does show how far we have come since that first forum in 2005.
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