Compliance News & Articles

This week the GRC focuses on compliance and inserts a little web publishing for good measure.

Not long ago, we discussed Vamosa’s (news, site) work in the Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) field and their new Check and Fix tool.

Recently, the vendor extended its Check and Fix functionality to cater more to eDiscovery and web records management scenarios.

A new partnership between Canadian-based Titus Labs (news, site)  and Maryland-based Epok Inc (news, site) aims to add to the volume of documents that SharePoint users can manage, and to extend access to those documents to external users without the ever present nagging security concerns.

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.

Compliance, compliance, compliance. It's not that companies don't want to be compliant. They do. It's more that there are many things that complicate the process, like vendors with too much access to private information and virtual environments. Two recent surveys highlight these issues.

The release of v3.6 of NextDocs (news, site) Regulatory Document Management system continues the company’s move towards establishing itself as the principal provider of document management systems for the Life Sciences.

It comes with pre-configured support and full validation documentation for the DIA Electronic Document Management (EDM) Reference Model.

NextDocs (news, site), a company all about regulatory document and quality management software, is mixing with a SharePoint system integrator called speakTECH. The strategic partnership was announced this week, and the game plan is to offer a unified approach to regulatory compliant document and quality management tools.

"speakTECH has a long and proven track record of successfully deploying Microsoft SharePoint and SharePoint-centric solutions, “ said Erik Smith, vice president of Alliances and Regional Operations, NextDocs. “Their deep knowledge of the life science market, coupled with their ability to minimize organizational risk through the use of their SharePoint Governance Kit positions speakTECH at the forefront of the SharePoint system integration community.”

speakTECH is equally enthused about the opportunity, citing NextDoc’s expertise in the Microsoft SharePoint document and quality management space as a stepping stone. "Customers are demanding open, extranet capable and easy-to-use solutions like NextDocs to maximize their infrastructure investments and minimize their regulatory risk,” explained Jean-Claude Monney, Chief Solution Strategy Officer, speakTECH.

Find out more about NextDocs here, or check out the magic of speakTECH.

The latest report from Forrester Research (news, site) would seem to suggest that companies are slowly coming around to the fact that it's bad business to put investment in records management on the back burner.

While there is a recognition that records management is a core business process in any company, only 20 per cent of companies would be “very confident” that they could meet eDiscovery or compliance requests if they were asked to do so in the morning.

However, the good news is that by the end of 2010 more than half of those surveyed in the 14-page report, entitled Records Management: User Expectations, Market Trends, And Obstacles written by Brian W.Hill of Forrester with Matthew Brown, Peter Schmidt, say they will be expanding their technology deployments in this regard.

With the general launch of Trusted Edge v4.0, Maryland-based FileTek is taking the unstructured content bull by the proverbial horns and -- transparently, the company says -- going onto employee’s laptops and desktops to get all that pesky content properly classified.

What this version of FileTek will do is to extend existing enterprise content management policies and go rummaging through desktops where FileTek reckons up to 80% of this content resides.

What’s even better the company says, is that you don’t have to be working with a FileTek product to use it as it can be easily integrated with the majority of large ECM systems, including SharePoint, IBM Content Manager, Open Text Livelink and EMC. 

This week in Governance, Regulation and Compliance examines the current state of eDiscovery and issues within the oil, gas and energy sector.

The final day of the International Legal Technology Association's (ILTA) annual knees-up still gives you time to catch-up on the new additions to Open Text’s (news, site) stable of legal solutions that were unveiled over the course of the five day conference.

For anyone that checked-out their roadmap for 2009 at the end of last year, the two principal additions will be no surprise.

Open Text announced the further integration of its eDocs products with its Open Text enterprise content management suite, and it unveiled a new version of its Enterprise Connect, which offers new plug-ins for Microsoft SharePoint and eDOCS DM.

Vamosa's (news, site) been a busy little bee this summer. On top of landing a pretty penny (er, pound) from the Capital for Enterprise Fund and a partnership with SchemaLogic, the enterprise content governance specialists have formed a strategic alliance with Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP). The union is expected to further address ECoG by way of a range of technologies for analyzing, migrating, monitoring and maintaining unstructured content types, such as Web and document content.

The partnership will operate under the belief that most companies don't consider content governance challenges until they launch a migration or consolidation project. Logically, the match works because CTP's individual response is to help companies understand and address these challenges beforehand, while Vamosa offers an integrated suite of products to manage the end-to-end process of maintaining content quality.

"The notion of web and enterprise content governance is gaining more attention within the enterprise," said Vijay Srinivasan, CEO of CTP. The challenge many organizations face today is compliance--or lack of it--with internal and external policies and regulatory standards. While enterprise content tends to be driven by content quality and governance principles, many organizations often end up with content that is not accessible, not cost-controlled and impossible to search.”

Word on the street is that together the two companies will begin by focusing on popular platforms like Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum, Oracle UCM, IBM Lotus Notes, and Day Software. To keep up with the developments, hang around here.

Workshare and NetDocuments are extending the scope of their integrated document management product resulting in a more comprehensive document management solution that should appeal to their base clientele in the legal industry.

Whether the new offering is in response to growing compliance demands generally, or whether it is to copper fasten their collective hold on the legal market is not clear.

What is, though, is that this broader, or deeper, integration provides multiple options to leverage this document comparison product that has been on the market since 2001.

There's a lot of anticipation about the upcoming SharePoint 2010 release. But back on Earth, the reality is that SharePoint 2007 has already become a key component of enterprise infrastructure.

In fact, according to a recent IDG survey, 62% of CIOs said that SharePoint was a critical component of their technology portfolio. And these organizations have big plans for expanding SharePoint use in the next year.

Primary areas of growth will be:

• business process management (63%)
• records management (40%)
• web content management (39%)
• application development (35%)

Ed Durst, portfolio manager of the Microsoft Solutions Group at Open Text, says that SharePoint is starting to be treated as a true business application, similar to Microsoft Exchange or SAP. This new status demands new thinking and new practices.

Unplanned Growth Causing Problems

There's bad news along with the good. According to IDG Research's findings, SharePoint growth has been primarily unplanned and there have been some consequences.

Business Management Problems

• Insufficient workflow processes (44%)
• Disorganized content (40%)
• Lack of an over-arching site creation strategy (38%)

End User Problems

• Difficulty searching across multiple SharePoint sites (43%)
• Duplicated document or record copies/multiple content versions (42%)

Durst says there has always been tension between corporate control over and user acceptance of new technologies. With SharePoint, you now have IT managers saying they have a tool users like, they just need to establish better governance and control.

Taking Back the Infrastructure

Before organizations can move to the next level of business capabilities with SharePoint, they need to ensure their infrastructure is solid and will support growth.

Resolving these challenges, along with ensuring the administrative and storage costs costs associated with growing SharePoint don't overcome the organization, are key planning components.

This Wednesday at 2pm ET (11am PT), you are invited to join a webinar entitled Taking Back the Infrastructure: Why Optimizing SharePoint is Critical for Today's Corporations. The event will cover the IDG survey results and how you can implement SharePoint in a way that is cost-effective and well governed.

You can register here for the webinar.

1 million British pounds equals 1.6 million U.S. dollars, 1.2 million euros and 21.25 million pesos. Lesson in exchange rates aside it’s obviously a hefty amount of money, making Vamosa’s (news, site) recent negotiation through Glasgow-based Maven Capital Partners no small accomplishment.

The money pot is called the Capital for Enterprise fund, and Vamosa is one of the first two companies to be assisted by it.