Aiim News & Articles

Email management is difficult. Apart from the problem of unstructured enterprise information floating around in several systems, email is often used by staff as a collaboration tool rather than a method of  communication. 

The result can be chaos. However, there are many email management solutions on the market that can help you. But which one do you choose? AIIM's (news, site) email management  educational program, might be able to help you start the process of picking one.

This week there’s been a couple of wild claims doing the circuit, not least of which is the demise of SharePoint at the hands of Salesforce.com’s Chatter, while Microsoft gets social with Outlook.

If you haven’t sorted out your document management issues then AIIM suggests you might look at document management service companies. Business process management and software is quickly becoming mainstream.

The upcoming AIIM+ Expo (news, site) in Philadelphia will offer close up access to SharePoint 2010 via its own dedicated summit.

A sure sign of the tough times we’re living in at the moment is the number of companies that are starting to offer SaaS, including solutions for security, data backup and analytics. The last week has seen a lot of activity on this front in the SMB sector.

Last week we saw a considerable amount of movement in the document management software industry, not the least of which was the closure of the Xerox –ACS deal. The wheeling-and-dealing continues this week with the acquisition of AmberPoint by Oracle while AIIM and Gartner get back into gear with some research published recently.

In the world of Document Management two of the hottest topics are cloud computing and security. Interestingly, however, it seems that according to a report from Forrester we're not taking to cloud storage at all, and we also discovered that data security is increasingly troublesome. Could it be that there's a link between the two?

Our new weekly column -- SMB Tech Roll Up -- provides you with news about the small and medium business sector, focusing on document management, collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 topics.

This week sees IBM promising more for SMBs, Xerox making moves on the European document management market,  IT managers facing new pressures to produce results and other interesting news from key SMB players.

The problem of unstructured information floating around enterprises has reached such epidemic proportions that AIIM (news, site) has decided to take to the road at six locations over the coming months to persuade companies to develop a holistic information strategy.

The six seminars will take the guise of AIIM's “8 things about . . .” framework and will specifically look at eight factors to consider when creating an information strategy for enterprises.

It's a new year and we bring you a new weekly column with a roll-up of what’s happening in the global document management software space. This series will focus on major news events, research and trends, it will complement another new column which will focus on document management and enterprise 2.0 news exclusively for SMBs (stay tuned).

Despite a slow start to the year this week has brought some interesting research from Gartner and AIIM, a stack of fancy awards for Autonomy and some intriguing new partnerships.

Here's a quickie for you: John Newton, Alfresco (news, site) Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, was recently named to the AIIM Board of Directors.

The board is comprised of what the company is calling "the 'who's who' of the Enterprise Content Management industry elite" and, after reviewing Newton's background, we'd say he's certainly paid his dues for the title. His achievements include co-founding Documentum (acquired by EMC), and as a member of the OASIS Technical Committee he has helped to spread the Content Management Interoperability Standard (CMIS). 

His CMIS efforts can be seen within Alfresco Community 3.2, which implemented CMIS 1.0 in November of this year. 

"John brings years of experience in all facets of the document and content management history," said AIIM President John Mancini. "His extensive knowledge of this industry is second to none and he will be a welcome addition to our board. I look forward to John's participation and counsel." 

Confirming the recent Forrester Report that showed a widespread lack of management of electronic records, AIIM (news, site) has just published a similar report that shows 26% of organizations admitting that they have no electronic records management policy.

The report also shows that nearly half of companies surveyed (44%) have no procedures for freezing electronic records in the event of litigation or compliance issues.

Earlier this year AIIM (news, site) released its annual State of the ECM Industry 2009 report which found that overall, electronic content at an organizational level is in a mess.

Revisiting the report in the cold light of day AIIM President John Mancini summed up the findings of the report on the Digital Landfill blog recently.

Hardly a day goes by that we don't find ourselves covering some of the eight facts about document management that he raises. Three of these in particular, strike a chord with us, as we are sure they do with you.

• Email Exposure
• Legal Discovery
• SharePoint Deployments

A new AIIM (news, site) survey for the EMC Corporation (news, site) that has just been released probably provides few surprises concluding that investment in document capture technologies is ultimately going to save companies money.

However, in all such surveys there are always one or two points that really make you stand back and go “Wow’! I wouldn’t have thought that at all!”

And this one is no exception. In this particular case the ‘Wow factor' comes from the revelation that while most organizations have already invested in capture technologies, two-thirds were only scanning 50% of possible documents.

Here’s something new that is likely to be of interest to a lot of companies struggling with their SharePoint implementations -- a collaborative environment focusing on a collaborative environment.

A joint effort by Corridor Consulting, a Boston-based consulting firm focusing on enterprise content management initiatives, and Chicago-based Doculabs, a technology strategy consulting firm, SharePoint Governance.org, provides a ‘safe’ place to discuss and maybe solve all your SharePoint woes.