Latest Records Management News & Articles

Information governance — historically a bottom-up practice and now the responsibility of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) managers — has been pushing its way into boardrooms around the world. Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, The Basel II accords and similar regulations have triggered this trend.

The problem is that the concerned parties rarely speak the same technical language. Modern enterprise information management systems are helping to address the problem but there are still a few secrets to success. Here are some things to keep in mind during your initiatives.

Over the past year, we’ve pondered about how to best manage workflow, including all facets of information management. Due to the recession’s impact and the threat of litigation, those in the enterprise are still resisting those topics.

There are many resources available at the enterprise level. Among them, Recommind’s new Risk Monitoring Center (RMC).

Here’s a fun fact: according to Faulker Information Services, over 10% of contracts executed by large organizations are lost after being archived on paper or in electronic systems. That’s a frightening number. In fact, any amount of lost information is enough to cause alarm, especially when it has to do with business transactions.

What’s even more alarming? Only a reported 1% of companies have chosen to take preventative measures. Here to encourage action is Dolphin Software and their Contract Manager for SharePoint.

I spent this past week in Orlando, Florida at EMC World 2009. This year enterprise content management vendor EMC (news, site) put their best foot forward in an effort to make Content Management and Archiving (CMA) attendees — otherwise known as Documentum users — feel like they were attending a conference that was addressing their needs.

For the most part, they succeeded. Here's a summary of what transpired.

Think the government is watching you? You're probably right.

But for the rest of us, we can turn to Surveillance Self-Defense to educate us about the law and technology of communications surveillance, computer searches and seizures — and more importantly, how to keep your private data out of other peoples' grimy little hands.

If you want your products to be used by big government, then Department of Defense certification is a must. IBM (news, site) understands this well. They have just announced that their solution:  Record Manager has just received its DoD Certification.

Open Text (news, site) held their third quarter fiscal 2009 investor teleconference yesterday and as was expected there were lots of questions on the Vignette acquisition plans.

Open Text announced their plans to acquire Vignette (news, site) just yesterday morning. The reported deal size was about US$ 310 million — a tidy sum for a content management systems vendor that has been struggling a bit as of late, with software license revenue in steep decline. Here are some insights as to why the ECM Canadians fell for the WCM Texans.

Sometimes it is easier to figure out why things fail, rather than trying to figure out why things succeed. Maybe because hindsight is 20/20 or because it is hard to predict where the saturation point meets the tipping point. Whatever the reason, we can't help but delve deeper into the psyche of failure in an effort to capitalize and reap success.

In today's installment of Why Things Fail, we take a closer look at the enterprise archiving and three key questions you need to ask before choosing a solution to implement.

Brava for Legal ISE!

No really. Informative Graphics Corporation (news, site) announced a partnership with Trinity Technologies that will integrate IGC's Brava with Trinity's Legal ISE suite.

The suite acts as both a content management and legal discovery platform for EMC Documentum clients and now plans to offer e-viewing, collaboration and redaction options courtesy of Brava and Redact-It Enterprise.

AIIM has released its annual State of the ECM Industry research report. And although the term Enterprise Content Management was coined about eight years ago, the research findings are still not very optimistic in some areas.

Not surprisingly, the bottom line is that electronic content in many of its shapes and forms in the organizational landscape is still (mainly) a mess.

Xerox Corporation (news, site) expressed its commitment to greener and more efficient alternatives to paper-driven work processes (be it in the U.S. or APAC) with two new enterprise CMS offerings: Virtual Filing System and DocuShare 6.5.

In December Mimosa released the NearPoint Retention and Classification Option. In January, they introduced the "Move to Mimosa" Legacy Migration Program. What is new for Mimosa Nearpoint in March you ask?

Delivery of its Mimosa NearPoint for SharePoint content archiving solution to support retention, eDiscovery and recovery.

Oracle has been serious about records management since they stepped up to the plate offering their first enterprise Records Management application in 2007. But that was 10g Release 3. Now it's 11g and it is the only product to successfully pass all parts of DoD 5015 V3 certification testing, including Baseline RM, Classified RM, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act (PA) RM. The question is, what are the other enterprise content management vendors doing?

Scrubbing (redacting) a sensitive document for electronic publication may seem like a simple process. Yet, as many high profile corporations and government agencies have shown, it's not as simple as it first appears.

The Informative Graphics Group's latest white paper, "Electronic Redaction: How to Properly Redact Documents," can help your organization's next redacted release be far more secure and far less embarrassing.

Trying to organize and implement Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions is a bit like wrestling a morphing blob of goo. Squeeze one part of the blob to get it under control and another section bulges out and falls on top of you.

For two years, a quartet of industry players has worked on ECM3 — an ECM Maturity Model created to help organizations tame the mighty blob. Let's take a look at what they came up with.

Xerox, in partnership with two other companies, has released new paperless solutions that will streamline paper handling in the legal profession. One new product will import hardcopy legal case files into digital folders with Xerox DocuShare. As a result, workflows surrounding court proceedings will be more efficient and eco-friendly.

The DocuShare system generates a preset collection of DocuShare folders to store critical information. Then, the software system notifies users of the court network when a new case is in the system. This new system from Xerox and WaterWare Internet Services alleviates the need to keep and store hard copy documents and expedites the process to produce legal documents under short notice.

Another new solution is Xerox DocuShare's integration with CaseHomePage, a product from partner ExtraAccess Service, Inc. With CaseHomepage, law offices can create an Internet site that houses pertinent legal documents in an organized manner. Attorneys, with the new system, can send files securely and affordably via the web, eliminating the need to use couriers or secure mail.

Xerox is working hard to streamline the day-to-day operation of law offices by alleviating a major headache: paper based filing and management. Does your organization have any experience with Xerox's DocuShare? Has the product been as useful as your organization originally hoped?

SharePoint, dear SharePoint. We talk about this business collaboration tool — sometimes called an enterprise content management system — on almost a daily basis. You either love it, hate it, integrate with it or try to replace it.

Alfresco has chosen the last option.

The Alfresco Share solution can integrate with SharePoint, but more importantly, it can replace it. The software from Alfresco can provide organizations with an open source SharePoint alternative that does all the things Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) does, and a little more. What is under the covers of Alfresco Share? Come, let's have a look.

Recommind, a software vendor we've covered in the past, has announced the availability of the latest version of their Decisiv Email software. Version 2.3 brings new functionality to the e-mail categorization software product including automated contacts management and enhanced search.

Open Text has extended its Open Text eDiscovery Early Case Assessment solution released in partnership with Recommind late last year to its records management eDOCS customers.

Open Text eDOCS customers will get eDiscovery capabilities woven into their overall content, records and e-mail management practices. Will this solution play the get-out-of-(recession)-jail-free-card for struggling lawyers?

Who do you turn to when you need to get 1000 congressional aides on line at once to simultaneously add their inebriated congressperson’s pork program pipe dreams into an emergency Fedzilla trillion dollar stimulus bill? When you need to produce a document so thick and riddled with meaningless charts, graphs and lawyerese it requires a forklift to deliver the summary? Well, with the new release of version 3.1 maybe RSuite’s CMS can do the job.