Document Management, Document Management Software

Probably the most talked about Service Pack in history is on the horizon, maybe as soon as this week: SP1 for WSS 3.0 and SharePoint (MOSS) Server 2007.

It's what SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Services 3.0 administrators, architects and developers have been anxiously anticipating. And it's jam-packed with goodies.

Well okay, not jam-packed…

Programming and software development is a thankless task, and you need all the help you can get, right?

Rubbish. You get paid a fortune and can stroll in at midday in a ZZ Top beard and pyjamas, and nobody in a suit ever talks to you because they have no idea what you actually do.

What the suits should do, of course, is ship you all off to a military barber for a #1, and then off to Qatar for six weeks of basic military training. That'd take the wind out of your sails. And while you're at it, stop off in Hong Kong on the way back for some tailored suits. It wouldn't kill you to look respectable once in a while.

Life is far too easy for you developers. Unfortunately, if you are in the business of coding for the Vignette suite of Enterprise CMS (and other) products, it's just gotten even easier.

The release of Alfresco 2.9 is imminent, and word on the street is that the new upgrade will feature integration capabilities with several of your favorite web applications. The news comes less than a fortnight after Alfresco announced integration capability for Facebook, news which doubtless prompted innumerable Enterprise CMS developers to choke on their morning cereal with anguish because they hadn't thought of it first.

Back for a seventh year, EContent Magazine has spent agonizing days, weeks, months — or just a lot of time, compiling their annual Top 100.

Top 100 what? Well, it's the best of digital content companies in the industry today. You've seen many such lists covered here before, I'm sure.

In January 2005, Massachusetts became the first state to throw down the gauntlet in terms of moving all public documentation to a non-proprietary format. The justification being, that it shouldn’t be necessary to purchase proprietary software to use digital public documentation.

Not only does it hold the constituents hostage in their need for a tool to read the proprietary format, but it also holds the government hostage in that the initiative to change off of any proprietary format is colossal.

Are the big boys like IBM a little worried about being left behind SharePoint in the enterprise content management (ECM) market? Seems enough so that they are working hard to implement solutions that help integrate with Microsoft's burgeoning content management offering.

IBM announced a new technology and global reseller agreement with partner Mainsoft that enables enterprise customers to blend Java and .NET technology. Of particular interest are the SharePoint Federator components.

The Forrester Wave for ECM Suites in 2007 is out, and like its rival the Gartner Magic Quadrant, it has listed IBM as the leader in Enterprise Content Management.

Back in the bad old days, when you sent an email somewhere containing some vital, time sensitive information, you just assumed that it got there, and that it would not 'conveniently' get lost or delayed somewhere along the line.

Yes, you laugh, but it's true.

When you sent a registered or notarized letter through either the mail or a courier service, you only certified the damn envelope, and not what was in it. Back in the day, you could send someone a contract to sign, and they could send it back to you with a crucial page missing, and claim that that page in question was not included in the original document. And then you might find yourself in a good old-fashioned mess.

For you, that day might have been today. But, at the risk of sounding like a corny advert, maybe tomorrow will be different.

Okay, so Microsoft has finally gone and done it. They have actually implemented their own technology that demonstrate it's capabilities, uh, sort of.

SharePointPedia is a social computing platform built on SharePoint Office Server 2007 (MOSS) developed to serve the greater SharePoint community, pontificating on and proliferating all things SharePoint. There's only one problem: it's not quite there yet.

Iron Mountain and ediscovery firm Stratify have enjoyed close links for some time. Now Iron Mountain's splashed the cash to acquire its former partner in a blockbuster US$ 158 million deal.

This marks the latest stage in Iron Mountain's comprehensive business evolution. Once regarded as little more than a records storage company, it's been spending big on acquisitions poised to help it become the industry-beating digital records management service provider.

SurfRay, a provider of search technology, has climbed aboard the global search provider bandwagon by acquiring Mondosoft, a pretty well-known-to-the-Microsoft-crowd enterprise search and behavior analytics vendor.

By way of the Windows Server team blog Microsoft have announced that Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 and beyond will no longer be bundled with the Windows Server. Instead, it will be offered as a separate — and still free — download, which customers must take the extra step to acquire.

The move is a significant one; but the implications are not so clear.

No one's safe from the M&A bug. UK firm Autonomy has just agreed to purchase Belfast-based Meridio for US$ 40.8 million.

Meridio is a global provider of enterprise document and records management software. Earlier this month, it updated its proprietary offering for easier integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and MS Exchange.

Not a bad relationship for its new parent company to inherit.

Hannon Hill has just released Cascade Server 5.0, the newest update of its browser-based web CMS product.

Reliability, flexibility and speed: That's what HH reckons Cascade Server 5.0 all about. The company boast users will find v5.0 faster and more reliable than previous iterations, regardless of how many people are using the system at a given time.

EMC Documentum is a leading player in the enterprise content management space. That's not news. What is, is the way the company has, with the release of Documentum v6 (D6), embraced Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a first-class principle in its core architecture.

How many times have you been faced with a repetitive, yet important, task and thought: Is there no way to automate this? Feeling this pain for knowledge workers across the globe, the Sleeter Group recognizes two products from Cabinet NG that aim to cure the ails of cubicle dwellers everywhere.

Trying to work out how to bring innovation to the archaic practice of document imaging?

Prick your ears up for this webinar sponsored by KnowledgeLake. It takes place on Thursday November 8, 12 PM CCT.

Listen in as Bill Trippe of Gilbane and Bob Bueltmann of KnowledgeLake discuss the practical aspects of SharePoint, enterprise CMS and various platform strategies. The event is sponsored by KnowledgeLake.

Register with them. When you do, you'll receive a white paper on SharePoint and the “platform approach” to document imaging solutions, courtesy of the smart folk at Gilbane.

It's a kind of 'Open Source 1.1'. Developers are springing up who build install stacks for open source products like the Drupal Web CMS or Alfresco's Enterprise CMS; offering packaged versions which automate and greatly simplify the initial deployment, or offer various usability augmentations to these powerful but often occasionally less polished products.

Open source being repackaged in this fashion is something we have covered before — SpikeSource are in this line of business. Bitnami though, they're taking things up a notch, introducing some welcome competition.

Paul Trotter, CEO of Author-it Software Corp., is a man who knows what he is talking about. If you don't believe me, just take a look at his bank balance.

He just published a White Paper on the implementation challenges presented by Content Management Systems as a whole. It ought to be required reading for boardroom-types, IT managers, webmasters — just about anyone whose job entails management of digital content.

But for those just waking up to the fact that they need a CMS, and are fretting over the issues involved in getting it up and running, you might want to take a look.

As impossible as it is to deny the importance of effective content and records management within an organization, it is just as difficult to deny the overwhelming lack of enthusiasm with which staff greet the idea of yet another system to learn and depend on.