Next Page
Document management specialist, NextPage, recently commissioned an IDG Research study to assess document retention effectiveness and risks.Finding? As most Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) people know, document retention policies are failing broadly. NextPage and IDG analyzed why, and have released NextPage 2 to address document storage risks. The productis one of the few applications that securely tracks document versions across e-mail, hard drives, removable media and servers.That's a lot to keep your eyes on, but someone (using some program) has to do it, because, as NextPage's CEO explains -- it's not getting done."Through several recent NextPage-sponsored studies, it has become apparent that document retention policies are failing at the desktop," said Darren Lee, NextPage's President and CEO."Although many companies have formal document retention and disposal policies in place and have implemented centralized storage systems, the majority of a company's documents do not get moved from the rather chaotic edge of the network into the more organizedcentralized system," he explains.This "creates unacceptable levels of risk. NextPage 2 Document Retention integrates with centralized storage and helps reduce the risks of desktop documents."How does NextPage 2 do all that?The new program is able to:* Automatically track document versions. With Document Retention, working copies of documents are automatically tracked as they are created, edited and finalized.* Seamlessly upload documents to a central repository. Once a document location is defined, users can automatically upload all document versions so the central repository can implement retention policies.* Send purge requests to delete appropriate documents. Now, because the location of all document versions are known, a team leader can send out the request to have users purge all working copies from the desktops, e-mail and removable media.* Provide the organization with an up-to-date status of documents under compliance. From the application, users can immediately see who has responded to the purge request and purged the documents and who still has copies sitting on their desktop.Since a "Team Leader" must order purges, it looks like the only element NextPage can't control is the most pesky -- the human one.So, while the new product is aimed squarely at reducing risks associated with sensitive documents, an organization's policies, training and common sense are still part of this solution.The study by IDG Research which motivated NextPage 2's new capabilities showed that only 62 percent of the companies surveyed have a document retention policy in place. Of that 62 percent, only 31 percent actively enforce the policy and 61 percent responded that fewer than half of their employees are adhering to their published retention policies. Given that 80 percent of corporate documents typically exist on individual hard drives, document retention and deletion polices are failing to account for most of an organization's documents. Enterprises interested in a copy of the study may visit www.nextpage.com/cio.For continued reading, its worth noting that a number of Enterprise CMS and Records Management software vendors are tackling this same problem. Stellent, recently acquired by Oracle, announced new technology for managing retention policies. FileNet (IBM) has recently updated their Email Manager product. Both Xythos and Microsoft announced DoD 5015.2 records management certification plans. And Open Text emerged this week with a new strategy to reach out to corporate desktops and disparate repositories.The records management, compliance, and retention space is hot right now and shows no signs of slowing down. With a huge amount of recent acquisition activity, the big players are getting bigger and the game is getting rough. Stay tuned as the market share battles continue.