Document Management, Document Management Software

The last time we talked about ZL Technologies’ Unified Archive was when it released version 7.0. So it’s only appropriate that today we talk about its latest release — version 7.0.4 of Unified Archive.

Microsoft has released its server roadmap and all paths lead to the cloud. It appears that although the company will continue to sell on-premise products, it really wants customers to move to cloud-based products.

We have become a society of data hoarders, saving every transaction, social conversation and even movement in hopes that someday it might be useful. This has moved big data from being the almost exclusive concern of Internet giants and financial firms into almost popular conversation. Accel Partners believes the trend will continue and is willing to make a big commitment to make sure big data moves forward.

If you haven’t got your Christmas shopping done yet, there’s a pile of new document management software that’s worth a look. SAP and OpenText have upgraded NetWeaver, Microsoft and Nokia have new apps for Symbian, Version One goes to R2.2, KnowledgeTree releases ExplorerCP and SmartVault has a new service update.

Think Big Data, and many of us think Big Government. In a recent white paper called Governing the Cloud, Granicus CTO Javier Muniz and CEO Tom Spengler offer five reasons why the cloud is going to make government and large enterprise governance easier.

SharePoint is crack and Microsoft is the pusher. Yeah, I said it. Listen up now, I’ll say it again. SharePoint is crack and Microsoft is the pusher!

The other week, I wrote an article that stirred up a bunch of CMS, DMS, ECMS and other content professionals enough to make them comment. Some agreed, some poked at what they perceived to be holes in my central claim. And a couple took it as an opportunity to express their opinion of how SharePoint is the divine gift to business and IT professionals. It seems like I’ve seen this tableau before, maybe even more than once.

Yesterday we saw in the Forrester Wave for Enterprise CMS Suites 2011 for Q4 that there is a shift in the enterprise CMS market away from the big, lumbering giants of a couple of years ago toward more content-centric apps designed to fulfill a specific business function. Today, we’ll take a look at how some of the major vendors are dealing with this challenge.

Discussion around the evolving role of enterprise CMS and the software that aims to do that are almost a weekly phenomenon. This week’s discussion comes in the shape of the Forrester Wave for ECM Suites for Q4, which highlights a number of issues that we already saw in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for enterprise CMS last week.

There’s quite a lot of interest in SharePoint this week with SharePoint-based compliance from NextDocs, compliance for those who are using SharePoint as an enterprise CMS from HiSoftware and a discussion on SharePoint governance from Symon Garfield. EMC has also upgraded SourceOne e-Discovery Kazeon to v4.6, while Check Point has bought Dynasec.

Customers attracted to Documentum, but dreading the deployment effort, now have a new option. EMC announced EMC OnDemand, a hybrid platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that includes EMC Documentum, EMC Captiva and EMC Document Sciences.

If you've got files hanging out in Google Docs, Dropbox and Box.net, being able to manage them through a centralized platform probably sounds like a capability you needed yesterday. Enter Joukuu Web, a file management tool that allows users to track, edit and share files across said services. 

Together, EMC Corporation and C6, a French enterprise content management software provider, are on a mission to ease CMS efforts. Today the pair released EMC Documentum D2, an application for the codeless building of content solutions that quickly match ECM application functionality to business needs. 

This week, IBM’s Domino migrations get easier with the release of DLItools’ Docova v3, Microsoft and Equisys team to integrate Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 with Office 365, Gartner takes a look at enterprise CMS vendors in its Magic Quadrant and ShareMethods upgrades document sharing, while PSIGEN and Nintex partner.

Pentaho, a provider of an open-source business intelligence (BI) platform, has announced its latest release. Like the rest of the information management world, the company is squarely focused on supporting — yes, you guessed it — big data.

Open source business process management vendor BonitaSoft has announced the latest version of Bonita Open Solution 5.6. The new release offers personalization by role that allows users to focus on how they need to work.

Enterprise content management is a 2.7 billion dollar industry with just a hand full of vendors competing for market share. Documentum was once the master of the content management space, the de facto product for most companies looking to automate their processes and get control over unstructured data. After the dot-com bust, Documentum’s presence wavered and was eventually purchased by EMC. EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s recently announced on an EMC’s earnings call that the Information Intelligence Group at ECM was down 5%. Oracle’s, on the other hand, is expecting to show an impressive 20% growth. And it has come up with a plan it thinks will help Documentum customers.

This week IBM announced that it has finally closed the Algorithmics deal that,  among other things, gives it financial governance software, OpenText upgrades its records management for email, StoredIQ adds a records management module, and Mitratech looks at legal IT spending.

There is a sense of frustration in the records management profession. An informal show of hands in a session on professional education at the recent ARMA conference showed that most of the attendees had college or university degrees in library sciences or archival studies. Few had degrees in business or technology.

The problem? Records management in the 21st century is all about business and technology. Over the last generation a disconnect has developed between the skills developed and the skills needed to be a successful, strategic manager of corporate records. The self-described “control freaks” of the content management world are finding it difficult to flourish in the social, mobile, collaborative business of 2011.

Cloud adoption and open source were just a few years ago considered risky, cutting-edge approaches only pursued by the most confident (or poor) of technology departments. Times have changed. Even the federal government — definitely not known for its propensity to be early adopters — has embraced both. Despite the growth in adoption and acceptance, the intersection of cloud and open source still has a quite a bit of maturing to do, and from the looks of things, some of that growing up might be quite a battle.

In a move to leverage advanced analytics to help differentiate its products, IBM said today it completed acquisition of Waltham, Mass.-based Q1 Labs and created a new Security Systems Division with former CEO of the acquired group, Brendan Hannigan, serving as GM. 

The acquisition comes with the promise of adding “greater intelligence” to new product offerings, as Q1 Labs provides advanced analytics to detect and flag suspicious or abnormal events. Q1 was a private company, and financial terms were not disclosed.