Document Management Roll-up: IBM Offers Cloud BPM, Bye-Bye Office 2010 Beta

By David Roe (@druadh20) Oct 12, 2010

This week, IBM announced that it will be offering cloud-based business process management that will be able to manage everything from expenses to document approvals without any on-premise software. We also took at look at what SharePoint 2010 has to offer in records management, while Office 2010 beta gets ready to wrap-up.

IBM Offers Cloud-Based BPM

It’s not strictly document management, but we all know how important business process management is in managing enterprise documents.

For companies that are looking for something that will help them with this, but don’t want the expense and hassle of a full fledged BPM suite, IBM (news, site) is launching Blueworks Live next month, which will provide enterprises with the ability to create ‘lite’ BPM apps in the cloud.

Costing US$ 10 user/ month, the new service will be available from November 20 and will provide easy management of common functions like expense sheets or document approvals.

Office 2010 Beta's Final Curtain Call

You may recall in April this year the hair pulling and teeth-gnashing that greeted Microsoft’s (news, site) decision to withdraw the beta of Office for Mobile, with users accusing it of pulling the beta without warning.

Well they’re not going to do that again, not with the beta of Office 2010, which is due to be shelved on October 31st. That’s Halloween, but Microsoft assures us that it is not all that scary really.

Hence the three week warning that appeared on the Office blog, which offers a “gentle reminder” that the free stuff is all over after that date.

Given that Microsoft says there have been over 9 million downloads since it was launched, it means that a lot of people are going to be left without it, or Microsoft is going to get one really big fat cash bonanza for Christmas as users move to upgrade.

Well actually that’s not entirely true. Not yet anyway. There is an extended two month trial period that you can sign up to if you are only looking to try out some of the programs.

Otherwise, users who want to install the released version of Office 2010 will have to uninstall the beta software first and then buy it, which Microsoft is asking people to do via download for environmental reasons.

Just to remind you — there are a number of options. Currently, Home and Student 2010 costs US$ 149, Office Home and Business 2010 US$ 279, and Professional 2010 US$ 499. Don’t say you weren’t warned this time!

SharePoint 2010 and Records Management

If you’ve been looking at SharePoint 2010 since its release you might have noticed that the new version comes with a few new records management functionality.

This functionality was designed to fill SharePoint 2007’s weaknesses. Notably:

Records Management abilities aren't very robust
Insufficient granularity of security
No way to enforce classification template policy for new team sites

However, with many companies still using SharePoint 2007 and others still trying to get to grips with SharePoint 2010, it is too early to form an opinion as to whether records management in SP 2010 is good or bad. We took a look at it to see what exactly it had to offer.