Records Management News & Articles

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.

More help for healthcare industry comes with the announcement that MRO Corp, a provider of release-of-information (ROI) and audit tracking software for the medical industry is now extending its reach into the document management sector with the release of three new products.

Until now the Pennsylvania giant has been happy with its ROI and tracking products -- not to be confused with Return On Investment(ROI) -- but like many companies, it too is moving towards end-to-end solutions. Hence the release of Chart Online, Filing Cabinet Online and Business Documents Online.

What happens when we make a comment about it being a while since we've heard from Laserfiche (news, site)? They suddenly burst with new news. In this case the new news, following shortly after the announcement of WebLink 8, consists of a document imaging and capture tool.

Quick Fields 8 works on the front-end of Laserfiche's ECM product suite, allowing each department to customize capture and image processing for their own forms, documents, and data.

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.

Technology consulting and enterprise content/records management consulting are now standing hand in hand on an electronic mountaintop.

The IQ Business Group recently announced its acquisition of eVisory as well as eVisory’s CEO Dan Elam, who will become The IQ Business Group’s vice president of operations for North America.

"Dan brings a significant amount of operational and sales expertise to our team," said Michael D. Beck, IQ Business Group President and CEO of North America. "His talents complement our existing leadership team and will allow us to continue our rapid growth in the US market while expanding our skills in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and the Public Sector market."

eVisory’s client history includes familiar faces like EMC Documentum, OpenText, SpringCM, and Autonomy. The IQ Business Group’s success is also clearly defined, as they are entering their second decade of double-digit annual growth.

The combo is expected to yield one big global player in the ECM and Public Sector industry. We shall see, we shall see.

If August went by as fast as you thought it did, don't waste any time this September making your eDiscovery plans.

In case you missed it, last month, the eDiscovery Planning & Decision Guide: Technology, Process & Policy was published.

Written by Robert F. Smallwood, industry expert and author of such reads as eDiscovery Readiness for Lawyers, Leveraging Microsoft SharePoint Services to Manage Electronic Records and Taming the Email Tiger, the eDiscovery Guide reviews market trends and covers 20 vendors in the industry.

IBM (news, site) announced fairly significant updates to its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) product families, including Business Process Management (BPM), eDiscovery and Archiving.

Apparently having heard the market scream for leaner, smarter product options and cost efficiency, the Big Blue has also introduced starter packs -- licensing-wise slimmed-down product versions targeted for smaller or departmental deployments -- for four of its ECM product lines.

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.

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.

There are many solutions available for eDiscovery. Yesterday, we talked about Clearwell Systems' initiative for updating data without having to move it.

Today, Recommind (news, site) says there's no need to go back and add or change keywords when you can have a concept search engine that knows all the keywords for you.

Recommind with its Mindserver Categorization focuses on enterprise and legacy data and provides some tools that aim to make records management a little easier.

If the process for managing records or search and discovery was linear, we wouldn't need many fancy, sophisticated tools to help us. But as it turns out, the process can be quite complicated and can go in many different directions.

Clearwell Systems (news, site), known for its eDiscovery platform, has announced the addition of three new modules to help users simplify the process by eliminating the need to move data across multiple tools.

eDiscovery solution services all aim to save customers and companies time and money. Due to the non-linear structure of eDiscovery, there are so many ways to go about making the process, whether it be pre-processing, data collection, filtering, review or post-processing phases, more pleasant for the user.

IBM (news, site) is focused on the analytics part of eDiscovery. Today they announced new IBM eDiscovery software with advanced analytics features. The goal is to help clients not just find information, but have them understand it better.

In a recent IDG Research Survey of 108 CIO's, 82% indicated that they use SharePoint primarily for file sharing and document management. That falls in line with what we understand.

There is much more to SharePoint than file sharing, and CIOs know that -- 62% say that SharePoint is critical to their technology portfolio, and they want to use it for much more in the year ahead.

But implementing SharePoint properly in an organization is not easy -- 55% reported that SharePoint challenges are impacting their business. According to Ed Durst, portfolio manager of the Microsoft Solutions Group at Open Text, there are a number of challenges related to SharePoint implementations.

Records Management Madness

One of these challenges is managing the creation of SharePoint sites. How sites are generated and managed -- or not managed -- is critical to a successful deployment. Implemented incorrectly, SharePoint sites become silos of information, which among other things, makes records management difficult. Durst says organizations are taking back control of the creation of sites through new governance and records management strategies.

Spiraling Storage Costs

Another common concern is the cost of supporting a SharePoint environment. Out of the box, there is a linear relationship to content and the cost of storage infrastructure for SharePoint sites. Organizations are finding themselves buying hardware to keep up with user demand. The key becomes building the right SharePoint infrastructure, so that costs to support the environment level out or become less.

With over 53% of surveyed organizations using SharePoint enterprise wide today, the need to optimize SharePoint environments is critical.

Wednesday, August 26, at 2pm ET (11am PT) you can join Ed to discuss the findings of the IDG survey and how you can better manage your SharePoint infrastructure.

You will learn how to:

• Generate and manage SharePoint sites, eliminating information silos
• Reduce the cost of SharePoint dedicated hardware
• Realize your goals for using SharePoint as a leading content and document management system

With big uptakes expected for SharePoint in the areas of records management (40%), application development (35%) and business process management (63%) in the next 12 months, having a  SharePoint infrastructure you can build on is critical.

You can register here for the webinar: Taking Back the Infrastructure: Why Optimizing SharePoint is Critical for Today's Corporations.

The Governance Portal, a software platform by Protiviti, has received an update. Version 3 offers enhancements to a GRC tool aimed at integrating proprietary information and expertise with a trusted framework for managing and mitigating the risks associated with compliance and regulatory issues.

From surveys and self-assessments to data collection and audit management, users can implement new features in the Governance Portal to help them manage enterprise and operational risks, optimize internal audit processes while monitoring compliance risks.

New York-based docSTAR has just upgraded and released its v3ten document management solution, which the company says represents a significant upgrade to its platform.

Like the other eight upgrades and/ or releases to the other document management systems that have been covered here since the beginning of August alone, this one, the company says, will revolutionize the document management world.

The principal difference over their 3.9 version, which was released last October, appears to be a better user experience all round.