Latest Document Management News & Articles

Maybe it just seems like it, but there is sneaking suspicion that you can’t set foot outside the door at the moment without tripping over another buddying-up between Digital Reef (news, site) and a new friend.

This time it's with EntropySoft (news, site) the enterprise content integration specialist. The purpose? To provide more out-of-the-box connectivity to more enterprise content management systems.

KnowledgeTree (news, site) is officially spreading its wings (limbs?). The open source document management software company today announced the grand opening of its North American headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The company has made other recent moves to ensure its future, including their edition of electronic signatures in the KnowledgeTree 3.6.1 release. The company, which is funded by Hasso Plattner Ventures, has already gained s worldwide traction, and is now reportedly focusing on building its US operations.

North American operations will be led by Tim Spink, who joins the organization as vice president of sales. His experience includes former senior director at rPath Inc., former vice president of sales at Solarwinds Inc., and various sales management and director positions at Red Hat Inc.

“We have been experiencing incredible momentum at KnowledgeTree,” said Daniel Chalef, CEO. “Establishing a North American headquarters was the next logical step and we are pleased to have an industry veteran like Tim join our team.”

eXpresso Corp (news, site) offers a way to make collaborating online using Excel files less of a hassle, improving productivity and awareness when sharing data.

Canada has been gracious enough to offer themselves up as an example of why having an eDiscovery system in place is really important.

It has been reported that in British Columbia, many email correspondences that occurred between the executive branch and the cabinet during one of the biggest business deals in Canadian history: the sale of BC Rail to CN Rail have been accidentally or mistakenly deleted.

Fresh off of an US$ 8 million investment used to expand their information management and eDiscovery solution, StoredIQ has put their money where their mouth is and announced the StoredIQ Desktop Agent solution.

Designed for "organizations who have geographically distributed sites, a highly mobile workforce, or a large number of employees" or as most call it, global CMS, the Desktop Agent Solution provides a central management console and network of friendly software agents to help filter and retrieve data related to search and discovery.

It's a non-stop flow of news from Autonomy (news, site) these days. Most recently, the company announced the integration of its document management product, iManage WorkSite, with Autonomy's workflow.

It doesn't come as a surprise that the new module — iManage Workflow Manager — is built on Autonomy's meaning-based technology.

At the end of March this year Alfresco (news, site) released version 3.1 of its enterprise content management system. Discussing the new release, VP of Business Development Matt Asay indicated that they had improved support for Kofax Capture. So the announcement that a new extension for Alfresco 3.1 is undergoing beta testing and will soon be ready for general release is no real surprise.

However, it was neither Kofax, nor Alfresco itself that developed the extension, but Alfresco’s partner Micro Strategies did the honors this time.

The buzz this morning at the dungeon-esque eZ Conference Developer's Track (it took a while to find the smoky back room) was on implementation of CMIS to integrate Alfresco's document management interface with eZ Publish.

Christian Lundvang from NXC presented on the topic with some help in the question period from Sergey Puschin.

Lundvang demo-ed how documents can be created using Alfresco's MS Word interface or Alfresco administration and then accessed in the eZ Publish Back or Front office. He then presented a case of creating and publishing a document from eZ Publish into the Alfresco space.

While Lundvang did not show a counter case of requesting the eZ Publish content repository using the CMIS interface, it is reportedly in the planning and under development.

The demo and discussions showed the strengths of the standard but also highlighted some potential limitations as pointed by some attendees. For instance, eZ Publish could store more structure contents than simply document oriented content: a folder in eZ Publish might have its own set of meta information when it is a very simple container in both Alfresco and the CMIS standard.

The CMIS standard, which has been advanced as a work-in-progress under the Oasis umbrella, has been provisionally adopted by a number of systems including Alfresco, Nuxeo and Day software. The current version of the standard, 0.61, has been implemented by NXC first to enable integration with Alfresco but it could then be used for any integration with a CMIS compliant solution.

eZ undoubtedly looks to this project as an example of how an eZ partner, like NXC, can contribute to the eZ Publish model: The extension, a collaboration between NXC and eZ Systems, will be integrated into the eZ Publish 4.2 release slated for September.

KnowledgeTree (news, site) recently called upon the powers of Labtronics Inc., a developer of software solutions for interfacing and automation, for assistance. The provider of commercial open source document management software wanted to make sure they were meeting the needs of customers working with a 21 CFR Part 11 compliant environment.

Tom Curtis, Labtronics’ Vice President of Product Innovation, conducted a technical review of the KnowledgeTree Commercial Edition. The results were good, but not 100%:

“We were extremely pleased and impressed with the security and audit trail capabilities that were already in place in KnowledgeTree,” he said. “The only area where our team found room for enhancement was in the ability to provide electronic signature challenges at key points in the application.”

Soon after, KnowledgeTree acted on the recommendation to incorporate configurable electronic signatures as a new feature in the recently released KnowledgeTree 3.6.1. “Labtronics’ expertise…was instrumental in providing this latest upgrade to KnowledgeTree,“ said Daniel Chalef, CEO of KnowledgeTree. “With the addition of electronic signatures to our existing security and audit trail capabilities, KnowledgeTree provides organizations with a cost effective document management solution that meets their regulatory compliance requirements.”

In any case, it’s good to hear that they’re up to speed. For other intimate details about the system, check out KnowledgeTree's blog.

Since the release of the fourth version of their first multi-case, multi-party eDiscovery review platform with process analytics, CaseCentral (news, site) has been hard at work simplifying the way early case assessments are managed.

Today, they offer an Early Case Assessment (ECA) offering that is seamlessly integrated with the eDiscovery review platform, eliminating the need to export data to another tool for ECA analysis.

Many industries face management challenges when it comes to regulatory issues. From the financial sector to the pharmaceutical, figuring out how to best manage, store and archive content while meeting compliance mandates is often a complex process. Thanks to Virtify, a leader in enterprise content management solutions for life sciences companies, things are getting easier.

Today they've announced the release of an end-to-end web based solution aimed at managing content and compliance requirements for all facets of the life science industries. Biotechnology, medical device, animal health and food sciences industries alike, the Virtx software suite offers a collaborative online environment for managing regulated content throughout the entire life sciences product continuum.

For companies that rely on secure virtual environments for the exchange of critical information, IntraLinks (news, site) announcement that it has upgraded its SaaS platform should be of some interest.

The New York-based company, which provides enterprise-class document management solutions, has been developing and redeveloping its platform since 1997, and has unveiled a number of enhancements that the company says will make life easier for its clients.

Going green seems an integral part of content management systems, but when you stop to consider all the documents and information being archived, analyzed and managed there's bound to be a fair amount of paper along the way.

But there will be a little less paper thanks to Informative Graphics Corporation (news, site), a provider of viewing, collaboration and redaction technology. They've announced a partnership with The Paperless Project Coalition and its Go Green Initiative.

The goal is to create a "paperless office" by transforming the relationship organizations have with paper. By identifying paper intensive processes within an organization and replacing them with e-solutions, The Paperless Project Coalition, sponsored by Square 9 Softworks, will help to eliminate the overwhelming need for paper. As well, it makes things a bit more efficient and hopefully less expensive.

IGC joins a group of organizations committed to providing all that is necessary in making document management more green. With IGC's suite of annotation and redaction software, it and other solutions like front-end capture, core repository and image conversion, help to "supplant old paper-based processes" with e-management.

Going green is not just limited to saving paper, it's also an initiative to save energy, time and money.

The release this week of AIIM’s (news, site) 70-page report entitled Recommended Practice: Analysis, Selection, and Implementation of Electronic Document Management Systems is going to answer a lot of questions about a lot of issues in the document management industry.

Principal amongst those questions are what constitutes a good, or bad, system, what kind of features should a good system have, and what features can it do without.

As an update to its 2001 best practice guidelines for the industry, this document does not set itself up as the definitive guide to all that is good (or bad). By way of introduction, it simply says it is for “anyone responsible for or interested in planning and implementing electronic content or document management systems”.

You may be one of the many organizations who uses SharePoint on a daily basis for collaboration and document management. But not everything you need to do your job is located in the SharePoint content repository, nor should it be.

The days of a single content repository are over. Now come the solutions that enable you to leverage a central interface to manage and work with content from multiple repositories. ASG Software Solutions (news, site) provides you this ability using SharePoint as that central interface.

Earlier this month we talked about how Mainsoft (news, site) was helping integrate SharePoint and IBM Rational Team Concert, providing SharePoint collaboration capabilities inside the Team Concert world. Good stuff for project teams.

But what about organizations who live inside their Lotus Notes environments? They also need some SharePoint love. And Mainsoft is providing it to them as well with the latest version of their Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes.

What's new in Version 2? Come have a look.

PSIGEN Software, a fourteen year old company built on the premise “perfect, simple imaging” has a pretty strong grip on the Document Management and Enterprise Content Management world.

Mostly known for their capture solutions for SharePoint, the company recently announced a new tool they hope will win over even more hearts from the Microsoft fan base. SharePoint Lookup Provider (SLP) provides integration with the SharePoint Database, which reportedly allows for a jazzed up automation process when scanning and capturing documents destined for document Libraries.

Anyone who regularly has to produce any kind of written content in the course of their working day will understand this — changing text without an apparent reason is very, very annoying.

It is maybe with this in mind that Sacramento-based Edit Connection has released a new document collaboration website that lets you look, but doesn’t let you touch — unless, of course, the author allows it.

It is this difference from wikis that will probably get most of the attention. Revizr allows numerous document collaborators make suggestions on changes to be made, but leaves the ultimate decision on those changes to the document creator.

Content Circles (news, site) keeps right on connecting. The company burst onto the scene not too long ago with their innovative, server-free collaboration solution. Shortly after the debut, they released a Xerox DocuShare connector which allows DocuShare users to share documents with a specified team, sans server. Now, the company is expanding their circle again by adding a similar connector, this time with Alfresco Software.

Who needs an internet connection? Not Content Circle users. The new connector enables Alfresco ECM users to share, collaborate, track and manage content offline or online.

Are you a lawyer, always on the go, needing to work on documents with remote teams when you aren't in the office? You probably aren't alone. And that's likely why Autonomy (news, site) has come out with a document management solution for the iPhone.