Compliance News & Articles

KnowledgeTree (news, site) is officially spreading its wings (limbs?). The open source document management software company today announced the grand opening of its North American headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The company has made other recent moves to ensure its future, including their edition of electronic signatures in the KnowledgeTree 3.6.1 release. The company, which is funded by Hasso Plattner Ventures, has already gained s worldwide traction, and is now reportedly focusing on building its US operations.

North American operations will be led by Tim Spink, who joins the organization as vice president of sales. His experience includes former senior director at rPath Inc., former vice president of sales at Solarwinds Inc., and various sales management and director positions at Red Hat Inc.

“We have been experiencing incredible momentum at KnowledgeTree,” said Daniel Chalef, CEO. “Establishing a North American headquarters was the next logical step and we are pleased to have an industry veteran like Tim join our team.”

It's a non-stop flow of news from Autonomy (news, site) these days. Most recently, the company announced the integration of its document management product, iManage WorkSite, with Autonomy's workflow.

It doesn't come as a surprise that the new module -- iManage Workflow Manager -- is built on Autonomy's meaning-based technology.

The notions of web and enterprise content governance are gaining more and more attention -- partially, due to growing concerns around eDiscovery and other compliance challenges. Everyone has some sort of content (and its volumes are growing at the speed of light), but do you have standards, policies and procedures around it? How do you enforce them?

The challenge many organizations face is compliance (or lack of it) with internal and external policies and regulatory standards. This is exactly the challenge Vamosa (news, site) is trying to address with its new product called Check & Fix.

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.

KnowledgeTree (news, site) recently called upon the powers of Labtronics Inc., a developer of software solutions for interfacing and automation, for assistance. The provider of commercial open source document management software wanted to make sure they were meeting the needs of customers working with a 21 CFR Part 11 compliant environment.

Tom Curtis, Labtronics’ Vice President of Product Innovation, conducted a technical review of the KnowledgeTree Commercial Edition. The results were good, but not 100%:

“We were extremely pleased and impressed with the security and audit trail capabilities that were already in place in KnowledgeTree,” he said. “The only area where our team found room for enhancement was in the ability to provide electronic signature challenges at key points in the application.”

Soon after, KnowledgeTree acted on the recommendation to incorporate configurable electronic signatures as a new feature in the recently released KnowledgeTree 3.6.1. “Labtronics’ expertise…was instrumental in providing this latest upgrade to KnowledgeTree,“ said Daniel Chalef, CEO of KnowledgeTree. “With the addition of electronic signatures to our existing security and audit trail capabilities, KnowledgeTree provides organizations with a cost effective document management solution that meets their regulatory compliance requirements.”

In any case, it’s good to hear that they’re up to speed. For other intimate details about the system, check out KnowledgeTree's blog.

Many industries face management challenges when it comes to regulatory issues. From the financial sector to the pharmaceutical, figuring out how to best manage, store and archive content while meeting compliance mandates is often a complex process. Thanks to Virtify, a leader in enterprise content management solutions for life sciences companies, things are getting easier.

Today they've announced the release of an end-to-end web based solution aimed at managing content and compliance requirements for all facets of the life science industries. Biotechnology, medical device, animal health and food sciences industries alike, the Virtx software suite offers a collaborative online environment for managing regulated content throughout the entire life sciences product continuum.

The release this week of AIIM’s (news, site) 70-page report entitled Recommended Practice: Analysis, Selection, and Implementation of Electronic Document Management Systems is going to answer a lot of questions about a lot of issues in the document management industry.

Principal amongst those questions are what constitutes a good, or bad, system, what kind of features should a good system have, and what features can it do without.

As an update to its 2001 best practice guidelines for the industry, this document does not set itself up as the definitive guide to all that is good (or bad). By way of introduction, it simply says it is for “anyone responsible for or interested in planning and implementing electronic content or document management systems”.

Open Source solutions seem to be in high demand in this down economy. So what do open source enterprise content management providers do to meet this demand? They add new features and functionality of course. At least that is what KnowledgeTree (news, site) has done.

The latest release of this commercial open source ECM is out today and offers a number of new features including integration with the entire Microsoft Office Suite.

Document management software vendor DocuLex (news, site) continues to develop its email offering, this time with enhanced security that allows WebSearch, its email archiving and document management solution, to detect unauthorized and inappropriate content.

Asked once what makes a great movie, Alfred Hitchcock replied ‘script, script, script’. Ask someone in legal or financial organizations what makes a great Enterprise Content Management system, chances are ‘compliance, compliance, compliance’ will figure in the answer.

Today’s announcement by Open Text (news, site) that it is entering a partnership with Sydney, Australia-based StoneBridge Systems, a specialist solutions provider of document and web content management, responds to that as compliance pressures in the land-down-under mount.

StoneBridge said it will now be reference selling services for Open Text’s solutions specifically targeting a number of vertical markets including financial based services organizations.

 AvePoint has once again beefed up its mission to protect and serve! SharePoint, that is. Focusing more on the protection side this time around, the infrastructure and management solutions provider has released two new compliance and platform protection tools: Content Shield and SharePoint Antivirus.

When Autonomy (news, site) announced its acquisition of Interwoven in late January there were many in the web content management industry who believed it was the beginning of the end for Interwoven TeamSite -- this despite Autonomy's commitment at the time that all Interwoven products would live on according to their existing roadmaps.

Well Interwoven does live on, but the roadmap? It's not quite the same. The existing roadmaps for TeamSite and the other products have been accelerated and the capabilities within TeamSite have taken on new meaning -- meaning based marketing.

CMSWire had the opportunity to talk with Autonomy execs to get a better understanding of what is happening since the acquisition was finalized -- there's been a whirlwind of announcements -- and what it means for the future of Interwoven's TeamSite web content management solution.

We've met the enemy and he is us.

It’s a fact, knowledge workers not only produce much of their tangible intellectual work via e-mail, but also implicitly form useful social networks, collaborate with geographically dispersed colleagues, and create organizational knowledge through the daily exchange of hundreds of e-mails.

As useful and necessary as e-mail is, it stills overwhelms us and costs businesses US$ 900 billion a year in lost productivity, according to research by New York analyst firm Basex.

Add to that the persistent loss of actionable knowledge -- because it's buried deep inside mail folders -- and you have yourself a nice little problem.

What can one do about this?

The brains at MarkLogic (news, site) think they have answers. And they are holding a webinar next Thursday to share them. The event is entitled: Reducing Information Overload: Turn Email into an Asset and will run Thursday, April 30th at 2pm ET / 11am PT.

What you will learn:

• How the corporate e-mail glut continues to cost businesses time and money 
• How to re-capture technical expertise for the entire organization
• How MarkMail -- an enterprise infrastructure tool -- is transforming the way we do e-mail archiving, e-mail search and knowledge management
• How Mark Logic uses MarkMail to eliminate chronic re-creation of repetitive knowledge, reduce unnecessary interruptions, and easily create an interactive knowledge system

Better Management of Email-borne Knowledge

MarkLogic's public MarkMail project celebrated its one year anniversary this past December. They set up this demo of the technology to give the public an accessible view into what they were capable of. To date they've cataloged over 7,000 public mailing lists with more than 37 million email messages, and the site is getting over a million unique visitors per month.

The idea is that email needs to be better leveraged. The company aims to deliver what Basex calls Friction Free Knowledge Sharing. With MarkMail email is the content source, allowing your organization to turn the "by-product of daily work into organizational knowledge."

Ready to learn more? Register today.

Companies struggling to control vast amounts of documents for compliance, or even litigation purposes, may be interested in the latest partnership designed to deal specifically with these issues.

This time the partnership is between open source Enterprise Content Management vendor Alfresco (news, site) and document management software provider Rational Retention (RR).

The result is a system that will automate the management of both structured and unstructured data from across an entire ECM that may be needed for drawn-out compliance and litigation proceedings.

In a positive and delicious way, that is... In an effort to extend the reach of its regulatory compliance and document management offerings, Open Text (news, site) has partnered with Lionbridge (news, site) to provide joint customers with development services of the aforementioned solutions.

Led by Lionbridge, the alliance is specifically targeting the pharma industry, but it seems that other industries can take advantage of it as well.