Document Management, Document Management Software

In his keynote address at the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, CA earlier this month, Microsoft CVP Jeff Teper, who many in the community refer to as the "Godfather of SharePoint," stated that governance "is not an issue in SharePoint 2010." That claim caused a bit of a stir from the audience, and Twitter was suddenly jammed with feedback and speculation.

The records and information management standard ISO 15489 groups authenticity with sister concepts reliability, usability and integrity. The standard tells us the retention phase of the life cycle of the record should eliminate as early as possible — and in an authorized, systematic manner — records which are no longer required. In addition, the record should retain its context so future users may judge its authenticity and reliability.

Virtual computing solutions provider Citrix has been focused on expanding its cloud portfolio. Earlier this year, it acquired Cloud.com, now it adds ShareFile to the family.

The SharePoint conference is over and still new releases are coming fast and furious. The latest is from Microsoft ISV Crow Canyon, which works with Outlook, Exchange and SharePoint, and has added a couple of releases that will effectively turn SharePoint into a CRM system.

IBM is back again this week, this time with the launch of a new bunch of SmartCloud services and software that aims to give its customers more choice when it comes to migrating their existing processes and data onto IBM’s PaaS, as well as more options when it comes to setting up private clouds.

While we have seen over the week just gone by the massive interest in SharePoint and a steady increase in the deployment of SharePoint 2010, how it is being used across the enterprise varies. A new EMC-sponsored AIIM report shows that one of those uses is as an enterprise content management system.

Since Westbrook Technologies introduced its cloud-ready enterprise content management system FortisBlue in October 2009, it has been building up functionality as the market demands. The latest upgrade is to make it mobile.

At last week’s SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, I attended the “CMIS Deep Dive and Roadmap” session, which was led by Adam Harmetz, Program Manager at Microsoft and Microsoft’s lead CMIS rep; Mike Mahon, President and CEO of Zia Consulting; and Ryan McVeigh, Director at Zia Consulting and CMIS Secretary and Technical Editor. The talk opened up with Adam giving a brief overview of what CMIS is and what its goals are.

This week it’s all about security. Symantec has come back from its Vision annual conference where it announced that it intends to spend US$ 1.25 billion on acquisitions and gives the world a chance to see its O3 cloud security offering. Android gets more security, while MS says zero-day attacks are relatively rare. WebLayers beefs up its governance.

Box.net is gearing up to take on bigger players in the enterprise software market. Having recently raised US$ 48 million earlier this year, the cloud storage platform startup has recently updated this Series D financing round with US$ 81 million from Salesforce.com and SAP, with Bessemer Venture Partners and NEA contributing to the round.

Last week was a busy one for conferences, but it was also a busy week for document management. BlackBerry users will be able to have access to Office 365 documents in beta, Colligo offers document management for SharePoint, eFileCabinet heads to the cloud, LibreOffice celebrates its first birthday and Version One partners with Intuitive.

For the last few months I have been working on a project for the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (an agency of the European Commission) to prepare a techno-economic assessment of the enterprise search industry and market in Europe. I’m not in a position to disclose the outcomes of the project, but in the course of the research I did examine how organizations went about selecting an enterprise search solution, and looked at the websites of around 60 vendors. At the same time I was working on an intranet strategy project for a European company with over 40,000 employees world-wide and no enterprise search capability! In this column I’ve summarized some of my conclusions from these two projects.

With all the money IBM has spent over the past three years on analytics, it’s hardly surprising that it is trying to get as many new releases out onto the market as possible. Over the week, it has added to what it already has in the analytics space by upgrading and releasing products aimed at improving business process and developing smarter applications.

The primary focus of the SharePoint Conference 2011 was on productivity with the SharePoint 2010 platform. As a result a number of case studies where presented, including this one from D&M Holdings, who designed a single SharePoint content repository to support multiple sites. Here's the whys and hows of what they did. 

While attending the Oracle Open World conference in San Francisco last week, I had an opportunity to discuss the many different Oracle announcements with customers. The general theme from my conversations can be summed up as “Wow, that’s really cool, but how can it help me?”

Day two of the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim (held October 3-6, 2011) and around 300 people packed into the room to listen to Todd Ray, a Senior Business Strategy Consultant within Microsoft Enterprise Strategy Services. As part of this group's Enterprise Strategy Program, Todd works with Microsoft's enterprise architect community to implement Microsoft's Value Realization Framework. The demand for this session (#SPC226) was so high that people were turned away at the doors, and this was one of only a handful of sessions that had to be run a second time. Expectations were high…

At the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim California, Rob Koplowitz, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, shared the results of the Forrester survey on "Best Practices in SharePoint 2010 Adoption and Migration." The crowd was near capacity, and full of questions about the various data points, and some of Forrester's qualitative input. The following is a synopsis of the session, with some of my own feedback on the numbers from their survey of just under 1,000 SharePoint 2010 customers, the Forrester interpretation of the data, and my thoughts on where there may be room for additional research and investigation.

The usual view of a conference is to hear about the latest in product development, or the road map of the next technology strategy; so if that’s what you are looking for, it’s not here. The story that gets missed is what happens on the exhibit hall floor and the latest in vendor booth tactics, which I cover in this article. Competition for which booth seems the busiest is fierce as the tactics to attract attendees range from old fashioned in- your-face intrusion to gimmicks that don’t necessarily attract qualified buyers.

Forget about Box's ongoing SharePoint bashing, Huddle stepped it up a notch and did a little cheer — and not for SharePoint — at the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim this past week. Oh yea, and they announced a strong first quarter for 2011.

Yesterday was the final day of the SharePoint conference. I chose to attend a morning session lead by Jeff Fried, CTO & VP of Engineering at BA Insight and Guy Mounier, Co-Founder & CEO of BA Insight. This session is a vendor-sponsored session, which means that the vendors are free to discuss their specific products and tools. I have worked in the past with previous versions of BA Insight and I was curious to see what they had in mind for working with Office 365.