Records Management News & Articles

LegalTech New York 2012 is only days away, but announcements are rolling out beforehand in anticipation. This week, Nuix, a worldwide provider of information management technologies, including e-Discovery and electronic investigation, announced that it will be launching and showcasing its latest e-Discovery and Big Data solutions during the conference.

It’s not every day that you get to meet with the Former Director of Modern Records at National Archives and Records Administration. But when you do, the topic of discussion is bound to drift toward the Federal Mandate for Electronic Records Management.

Communicating how your organization may implement SharePoint 2010 best is a very delicate message. Clearly communicating the value for every department, while acknowledging their different needs, is an important step in the implementation process. Introduce the language below to market gingerly towards the user community and the project implementation team. Intersperse these phrases in tandem with less records jargon-specific terms.

Information management in the enterprise has clearly been a matter of considerable concern over the past year. Even leaving aside SharePoint 2010 (which we will look at in another post), interest in it has been intense. Here is a list of subjects that appear to have hit the spot. There are dozens more that could be included, but these are the ones that caught our attention.

The end of another year in document management, and what a year it was. There really was something for everyone from SharePoint, to HP and Autonomy, from open source to enterprise CMS. Here are some of what we think are the highlights of the year. Undoubtedly you’ll have others, so let us know and maybe we can get a second list up and running in the New Year.

The announcement that HP was buying Autonomy earlier in the year caused a lot of consternation, not least because of the US$ 10. 2 billion price tag. No one was really sure where the money would be recouped. The release of TRIM 7.2 built with Autonomy’s IDOL gives some idea of where HP is going with all this.

Work for the government? If so, you have received a direct order from our commander-in-chief to get your records in order. Two weeks ago, President Obama gave federal agencies four months to come up with a plan to reform records management by moving to electronic records management systems. So what now?

One of the biggest problems with records management is that if you don’t classify documents in a logical and consistent way, you might as well not have records management software. OpenText has taken the pain out of classification by introducing auto-classification that uses OpenText’s content analytics engine.

Everyone that uses the web knows that it's a wild, wild world out in hyperspace. But there’s other places that are equally wild, and positively dangerous for your data -- and most of them are in your enterprise. A recent white paper by Quest outlines three of the major problems, and six simple solutions to solving the problem of data governance.

Looking for a powerful engine to drive your information management efforts? Need an additive so you can search, manage and retain sensitive documents, files and emails like a well-oiled machine? Introducing Octane Version 4, Index Engines’ major new release.

This week IBM announced that it has finally closed the Algorithmics deal that,  among other things, gives it financial governance software, OpenText upgrades its records management for email, StoredIQ adds a records management module, and Mitratech looks at legal IT spending.

There is a sense of frustration in the records management profession. An informal show of hands in a session on professional education at the recent ARMA conference showed that most of the attendees had college or university degrees in library sciences or archival studies. Few had degrees in business or technology.

The problem? Records management in the 21st century is all about business and technology. Over the last generation a disconnect has developed between the skills developed and the skills needed to be a successful, strategic manager of corporate records. The self-described “control freaks” of the content management world are finding it difficult to flourish in the social, mobile, collaborative business of 2011.

Recent trends in e-Discovery point toward a very promising development -- companies are recognizing the pitfalls of existing models for handling e-Discovery, and they are working smarter. As the cost of e-Discovery continues to sky-rocket, a definite movement is growing among large enterprises who want to make e-Discovery more efficient, defensible and cost effective.

Think for a minute about how your company manages its email. How confident are you that it’s as secure as it needs to be? You’re not alone. According to Oasys Limited’s September 2011 Business Behavior & Email Management Project in which they surveyed 1,237 employees across a variety of disciplines, 96% of employees believe their companies face some level of legal risk associated with poor email management. Twenty percent said that their company faces “High Risk.”

Gartner’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for the Enterprise Content Management industry confirms what many suspect: The content management landscape is changing quickly, and changing dramatically. Today we look at the market changes identified in the Gartner report, while tomorrow we will look at which vendors it has identified in the Leader's Quadrant.