Records Management News & Articles

Alfresco (news, site) has been talking about their ability to support to the complete CMIS specification in the next version of their ECM for a little while now, but that's not all that has arrived with Alfresco 3.2. The latest version of the community edition of their open source enterprise content management software also includes some updated records management capabilities, improved Forms, IMAP support and a nice solution for the iPhone.

Canada has been gracious enough to offer themselves up as an example of why having an eDiscovery system in place is really important.

It has been reported that in British Columbia, many email correspondences that occurred between the executive branch and the cabinet during one of the biggest business deals in Canadian history: the sale of BC Rail to CN Rail have been accidentally or mistakenly deleted.

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.

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”.

Over the past year, we’ve pondered about how to best manage workflow, including all facets of information management. Due to the recession’s impact and the threat of litigation, those in the enterprise are still resisting those topics.

There are many resources available at the enterprise level. Among them, Recommind’s new Risk Monitoring Center (RMC).

The title of visionary isn't one that is handed out as readily as it once was. Move over Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford. Make room for Mimosa (news, site).

The email and file archiving solution provider has been named a Visionary Vendor by Gartner, Inc. in its “Magic Quadrant for E-Mail Active Archiving.” But it didn't happen over night. Mimosa spent the better part of the last year adding new features to its Mimosa NearPoint platform to support eDiscovery, search and compliance.

Last year when EMC (news, site) finally unveiled its updated version of Documentum -- v6.5 -- it offered the promise of “balance between business agility and IT control.”

While it came chock-a-block with new Web 2.0 abilities, for Wipro, the global IT solutions provider, the new document and record management abilities prompted them to develop a new Hosted Document Management (HDM) solution leveraging Documentum.

Unveiled at last week’s EMC World 2009, the new solution, which is entirely scalable, is already available for interested companies.

Here’s a fun fact: according to Faulker Information Services, over 10% of contracts executed by large organizations are lost after being archived on paper or in electronic systems. That’s a frightening number. In fact, any amount of lost information is enough to cause alarm, especially when it has to do with business transactions.

What’s even more alarming? Only a reported 1% of companies have chosen to take preventative measures. Here to encourage action is Dolphin Software and their Contract Manager for SharePoint.

I spent this past week in Orlando, Florida at EMC World 2009. This year enterprise content management vendor EMC (news, site) put their best foot forward in an effort to make Content Management and Archiving (CMA) attendees -- otherwise known as Documentum users -- feel like they were attending a conference that was addressing their needs.

For the most part, they succeeded. Here's a summary of what transpired.

Think the government is watching you? You're probably right.

But for the rest of us, we can turn to Surveillance Self-Defense to educate us about the law and technology of communications surveillance, computer searches and seizures -- and more importantly, how to keep your private data out of other peoples' grimy little hands.

If you want your products to be used by big government, then Department of Defense certification is a must. IBM (news, site) understands this well. They have just announced that their solution:  Record Manager has just received its DoD Certification.

Open Text (news, site) held their third quarter fiscal 2009 investor teleconference yesterday and as was expected there were lots of questions on the Vignette acquisition plans.

Open Text announced their plans to acquire Vignette (news, site) just yesterday morning. The reported deal size was about US$ 310 million -- a tidy sum for a content management systems vendor that has been struggling a bit as of late, with software license revenue in steep decline. Here are some insights as to why the ECM Canadians fell for the WCM Texans.

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.

Sometimes it is easier to figure out why things fail, rather than trying to figure out why things succeed. Maybe because hindsight is 20/20 or because it is hard to predict where the saturation point meets the tipping point. Whatever the reason, we can't help but delve deeper into the psyche of failure in an effort to capitalize and reap success.

In today's installment of Why Things Fail, we take a closer look at the enterprise archiving and three key questions you need to ask before choosing a solution to implement.

Content may be king, but unless its secure, it will behave like more like the Joker in your Enterprise CMS rather than the King.

And with the number of security threats on the web growing, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) companies like Open Text (news, site) are working hard to see what solution they can develop to close the back-door on their systems.

This week, Open Text has announced the immediate availability of the latest version of their security solution -- Open Text SOCKS Client -- an enterprise-grade SOCKS V4 and V5 client.