Records Management News & Articles

The skyrocketing cost of eDiscovery has made headlines recently with several court cases setting precedents in favor of supporting huge eDiscovery costs. For example, a January circuit court decision required the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight to spend $6 million (totaling 9 percent of its annual budget) to comply with a subpoena for electronic documents; and another recent district court ruling enforces preservation and production of metadata.

These rulings make taking control of eDiscovery costs more important than ever, and with many eDiscovery options available, corporate counsel and law firms are realizing that they can significantly reduce costs by bringing eDiscovery in-house.

But going in-house with eDiscovery cannot be over-complicated by having to fit technologies together that were never intended for the task of eDiscovery. Many “eDiscovery” solutions that vendors are selling include hard to manage and unnecessary processes, such as archiving, that are the result of vendors pushing legal features onto technology platforms that are inappropriate for what is needed. This adds unacceptable and unnecessary costs, weaker eDiscovery processes and a hard to manage infrastructure.

Open Text has extended its Open Text eDiscovery Early Case Assessment solution released in partnership with Recommind late last year to its records management eDOCS customers.

Open Text eDOCS customers will get eDiscovery capabilities woven into their overall content, records and e-mail management practices. Will this solution play the get-out-of-(recession)-jail-free-card for struggling lawyers?

Who do you turn to when you need to get 1000 congressional aides on line at once to simultaneously add their inebriated congressperson’s pork program pipe dreams into an emergency Fedzilla trillion dollar stimulus bill? When you need to produce a document so thick and riddled with meaningless charts, graphs and lawyerese it requires a forklift to deliver the summary? Well, with the new release of version 3.1 maybe RSuite’s CMS can do the job.

About three years ago, Open Text made a big decision. It was what, Ed Durst -- Portfolio Manager for the company's Microsoft Solutions Group -- called "a big bet on Microsoft SharePoint". Three years later, nearly every transaction they do with a customer has some SharePoint (MOSS) element to it. That big bet seems to have paid off. Let's see how.

IBM and Google have partnered to improve the capabilities and value of personal health records – a core element of smarter healthcare delivery - starting with Google Health.

In collaboration with Google and the Continua Health Alliance, IBM launched new software that works to enable personal medical devices used for patient monitoring, screening and routine evaluation to automatically stream data results into a patient’s Google Health account or other personal health record (PHR). From there, patients can direct how their “health diaries” will be shared with physicians, family and other members of the extended care network.

Last week was the first face-to-face meeting of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC). From my perspective, it was a very productive gathering and allowed for a number of highly constructive discussions. In the following write-up I do my best to retrace the gist of the conversations around the topics I found most interesting, which in some cases were conversations I had with just one or two people.

The outlook from these discussions, and from the scope of the spec itself, is very positive. I believe that within a year CMIS will start to actively redefine the world of content management systems, which will be an opportunity both for big vendors who will see easier adoption of their solutions by customers concerned by lock-in or interoperability issues, and for smaller vendors whose products will be able to take advantage of a much broader spectrum of connectors to third-party systems.

Since its third release in October, CaseCentral has been working hard to implement additional features into its eDiscovery review platform. Today, they announce the fourth version of their first multi-case, multi-party eDiscovery review platform with process analytics.

We had an opportunity to talk with Steven d'Alencon, Chief Marketing Officer of CaseCentral about the release and the future of eDiscovery.

Next week, Informative Graphics Corporation will unveil a significant product update for their Redact-It Desktop software. Version 1.1 will include key optical character recognition (OCR) software that will remove sensitive information from scanned documents.

Examples of these types of data elements include social security numbers, names, phone numbers, account numbers and so on.

A second major feature of Redact-It Desktop 1.1 is the software's new ability to apply redaction functions to Microsoft Office files including MS Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel.

Redact-It Desktop, as CMSWire readers are already aware, is a software package that simplifies the process of redacting, reviewing, and disseminating documents to the public and for eDiscovery. Redaction is an important technology in today's world. With data breaches and eDiscovery in the news constantly, tools like Redact-It aide in avoiding sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands.

The base version of Redact-It Desktop is avaialble for US $195 with the OCR add-on costing US $49 from Redact-It's website.

Ever think about global warming, air pollution and dying out populations of polar bears? Or whether your grandchildren will be able to leave the house without an oxygen mask?

Yes, we are back onto the environment-friendly, green track. There’s a lot that can be done both at home (think recycling) and at work (not surprisingly, think content management).

Open Text recently received U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Records Management certification for a selection of its records management software offerings. Does this mean it’s six or seven-hundred times more expensive than similar solutions, works most of the time and there is at least one retired general on the board of directors at a generous salary?

Every day, every hour, every minute -- more information is flowing in, ad infinitum. A constant deluge. Each item must be addressed, classified, tagged, stored, secured, and made available for real-time recall. It’s enough to make a grown IT manager take up social drinking and ballroom dancing -- only without all that dancing.

The title of this article says it all, doesn't it? The folks over at SpringCM are probably jumping up and down right now, since they've just been considered a very promising company by Forrester Research. 

With e-Discovery a top priority for most enterprise organizations, the decision on which software vendor product to use can be difficult. There are many products and solutions on the market today that claim to help you organize and keep track of your data. For many, research reports from the top analysts are a tool to help in the decision making process.

This is a good thing for ZyLAB, an information access solutions vendor. They have just received the highest rating possible in analyst firm Gartner's MarketScope for E-Discovery Software Product Vendors, 2008. 

The folks at Clearwell Systems, whose platform works to streamline the eDiscovery process, have looked into their crystal ball and have offered a few predictions for the new year. Among them, trends that respond to financial and legal stresses as well as a need for more collaboration. The most compelling of their predictions lay within the realm of compliance and technology.

Earlier this fall Mimosa released a new solution -- email archiving -- as an addition to its NearPoint product. Tomorrow, they'll announce another new addition, aimed at classifying and tagging archived content.

Mimosa NearPoint Retention and Classification Option (RCO) is an add-on module to the Mimosa NearPoint platform that can help organizations lower storage costs and expedite eDiscovery by enabling automated management of user-generated content based on policy.