Aiim News & Articles

  We had dreams of a paperless workforce. By now we should have laser rays shooting out of our eyes that can scan, decode and upload relevant information into our bionic brains, eliminating the need for us to handle paper documents of any kind. For many of us, that simply isn’t the way it worked out.

Over the past 12 months alone, there have been two reports that suggest that SharePoint is being widely adopted across the enterprise and that it is being used in many cases as an enterprise content management system. A recent paper from Microsoft makes the business case for these two trends.

This year’s AIIM conference is a who’s who of social media geeks, academics, technology wonks, journalists and information technologists. AIIM 2012 will be held in San Francisco starting March 20. Among the well-known keynotes featured are New York Times tech columnist David Pogue, Empowered Forrester Researcher Ted Schadler and author and NYU faculty member Clay Shirky, all of whom will be sharing insights about managing information in the social, local and mobile era.

The end of another year in document management, and what a year it was. There really was something for everyone from SharePoint, to HP and Autonomy, from open source to enterprise CMS. Here are some of what we think are the highlights of the year. Undoubtedly you’ll have others, so let us know and maybe we can get a second list up and running in the New Year.

The tune about social business is slowly changing. A recent AIIM survey reveals that over half of user organisations consider social business applications to be significant, if not imperative, to their business goals. 

How many of our records management processes are based on something that was relevant in a paper-based world? As the enterprise evolves, we need to start developing processes that are based on the world in which we currently live -- which, thankfully, is not paper-based. John Mancini, President of AIIM, taught us how to Think More Broadly about SharePoint: Bridging the Gap Between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement during SharePoint Saturday.

In this, the month of everything SharePoint at CMSWire, we’ve started looking at SharePoint in some detail and with some interesting results. Last week, Jed Cawthorne, a Senior Strategy Consultant for enterprise content management, looked at uses for SharePoint. Here we will look at some of the challenges with deployments in the enterprise.

In light of the recent acquisition of BPM vendor Global 360 by OpenText, the question of the relationship between enterprise content management (ECM) and integrated business process management (BPM) software is, once again, in the spotlight.

The official release of Office 365 is expected today. Over the past week, there has been a lot of activity in the office productivity suite space, particularly with Google, which should see some interesting times ahead when Office goes to market. Laserfiche made its document management software mobile on the iPad, and AIIM says SharePoint users are still looking to third-party vendors.

Like many, we have been following the evolution of SharePoint 2010 since its general release last year. Anecdotal accounts suggest widespread deployment and use across enterprises with further deployments on the way. A little over a year later, we still wonder whether it has lived up to its initial promise and what exactly it is being used for at the moment and where it will go in the future.

When it comes to thinking about the enterprise, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The Gestalt school theorists saw "objects as perceived within an environment according to all of their elements working together." "The sum of the whole is greater than its parts” is the idea behind this Gestalt principle. It’s the perception of a composition as a whole. While each of the individual parts have significance on their own -- together -- the meaning may change.

While the benefits of cloud computing have been documented in many different studies and research papers, and many companies are looking to move to the cloud to solve IT problems related to cost, ease of deployment and scalability -- among others -- the question as to whether they actually should is still open to debate. Nowhere is this more relevant than in enterprise content management.

In AIIM’s recent State of the ECM industry research, we saw that content chaos is still the biggest challenge for enterprises, despite some progress over the past year. While shying away from dealing directly with the causes of this chaos, recent work by Forrester researchers suggests that the solution is not in the deployment of particular products, but changing the way we look at content.

Earlier on in the week,  we took our first look at the recent AIIM State of the ECM Industry report for 2011 and saw that, while content chaos was still the major theme this year, as it was last year, some progress has been made, even if a lot remains to be done.

It the wake of yesterday’s AIIM State of the ECM Industry report, where we noted that many enterprises over the course of this year are looking to break the boundaries between content repositories, it is opportune that HP (news, site) should be launching a strategy to provide holistic information management by providing an overview of content across the enterprise.