Documentum Records Manager Prepares For European Union Compliance

As the biggest gathering of enterprise content management software professionals outside of the US, it is understandable that Momentum Europe should be producing some interesting Europe-centric announcements.

One of those comes from EMC (news, site) who have just announced that they intend to apply for MoReq2 certification for Documentum Records Manager next year.

EMC has a number of solutions for information governance and life-cycle management that can manage documents from creation to editing to archiving to destruction, depending on what its users need.

When (and if, although it seems unlikely that it wouldn’t get it) EMC achieves certification it will make it easier to sell EMC’s Documentum Retention Policy Services, Records Manager, Physical Records Services and Federated Records Services across and to European Union central and local governments, not to mention military and other state organizations.

MoReg2 And DLM Forum

What is MoReq2 you might very well ask? Let’s go back through the mists of time, all the way to 1994 in fact (just think where the web was at that point, let alone electronic records management) and we find the DLM Forum.

Established by the European Commission, originally DLM was an acronym for 'Données Lisibles par Machine' (Machine Readable Information), but during a 2002 conference in Spain a resolution was passed changing the name, so DLM now stands for 'Document Lifecycle Management'.

To date, the most notable achievement of the DLM Forum was the production of European Model Requirements (MoReq) for the management of electronic records.

The DLM had always intended these standards be kept up to date as the digital information industry developed. So a new set of standards were developed and produced in 2008 called MoReq2.

These focused on the functional requirements for the management of electronic records by an electronic records management system (ERMS) intended for use throughout the European Union.

While neither the original set of standards, nor MoReq2, have the formal backing of any standards body, they have become the de facto standards by which all public bodies will gauge the effectiveness of an electronic records management system.

Why MoReq2?

So you can see why EMC would be anxious to get certification. The reality is that without it in Europe, the chances of a company tapping into that great big bag of cash that is the EU and national budgets is pretty slim.

And while these standards were drawn up for the EU, MoReq2 has been published in 12 languages including a number that won’t be heard on any of the European capital’s main streets.

MoReq2 consists of four main elements:

• Outline and full specification of a given system including a full metadata model
• XML schema to ensure the exchange of records between different systems
• A testing framework for compliance
• Governance regime that includes maintenance specs, and localization possibilities

MoReq2 And Documentum

So this is what EMC plans for Documentum in Europe next year. Its modular architecture should ensure that it achieves standards as it enables users deploy as little or as much functionality as they wish making each of its different elements very flexible.

These include:

• A completely transparent automated retention and disposition application called Retention Policy Services that is compliant with regulations, legal stipulations and best practices. It can be added to any supported EMC Documentum environment or as part of the fully certified EMC Documentum Records Manager.
• A physical records management application called Physical Records Services that will manage paper of microfiche records.
• Extension of retention and management capabilities to additional repositories, including third party repositories through Federated Records Services, a single system of record for content regardless of location or system.
• Records Manager, which gives users control of the entire record lifecycle according to a range of system defined policies. Records Manager is also certified as compliant with several standards in the U.S. and Australia.

The DLM Forum meets twice yearly. Next year there will be a meeting in May in Madrid, Spain and a further meeting in the Fall in Brussels, Belgium.

It is not clear whether EMC will have to wait for these meetings to achieve certification, or if it can be done by the DLM outside of biannual meetings. One way or the other, though, EMC looks set for MoReq2 certification in coming 12 months.
 

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