Alfresco Adding Real Records Management To Their ECM Suite???

I am quickly trying to catch up with many of the interesting Blogs out there on ECM. One such Blog is John Newton’s called Content Log.

The reason this Blog should be so interesting is John is one of the co-founders of Alfresco, an Open Source ECM platform. John’s post about including records management in some of the next versions of Alfresco is very interesting and I will be very interested to evaluate the implementation once they release it.

The Record Management ListServ on The Microsoft RM Team Blog

It has been interesting to watch the swirl of speculation of why Microsoft has finally jumped in the RM swimming pool on the Records Management Listserv (RECMGMT-L@LISTS.UFL.EDU). The archives of the Listserv are located at: http://www.lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html

This started after the fact that Microsoft started a Records Management Team Blog was posted to the ListServ today.

I may be able to offer another perspective.

Back in 2000 when I was the President of TrueArc, we saw the need for records management for the then SharePoint V1 and integrated ForeMost with SharePoint. We became the first vendor to get the combination DoD 5015.2 certified.

Starting back then and for many years I have lobbied long and loudly directly to the product folks at Microsoft to take a more active role in addressing RM with their products that create and manage content like SharePoint and Content Management Server.

What you have to understand is that Microsoft’s philosophy has been to be a platform provider which relied on partners to round out their solutions with the additional needed functionality. RM and workflow are two good examples of this over the last 6 years since we at TrueArc integrated ForeMost with SharePoint.

I think what has been happening over the last six years has been the normal evolution of Microsoft’s platform (STS -> SPS V1 -> SPS V2 -> SPS V3 coming) and the growing adoption of these technologies by the marketplace. As the SharePoint platform has gained significant popularity and adoption by many customers, they went back to Microsoft and said “Hey, we need some organic records management capability”.

I think they are also responding the competitive pressures of the market. Case in point is Oracle adding RM to Collaboration Suite 10g and the fact that their other main competitor, IBM, provides RM organically.

Finally, I think the entire ECM market is maturing and is recognizing the importance of RM as a core capability needed to manage the authenticity and life cycle of content. We have been shouting about this for years and it took Enron, MCI, and the response offered by the Sarbanes Oxley Act combined to get the rest of the business and IT world to sit up and listen. I think this is true with Microsoft. Their clients telling them that they needed help with compliance was another tipping point.

I think the great thing about the Microsoft RM Blog is that the RM team at Microsoft is not presenting marketing swill or pitching to all of us. They are starting a conversation and it behooves everyone with a comment, suggestion, question, or opinion to comment on their Blog. I know many of the Microsoft folks personally and they want your feedback and they will listen.

I hope that sheds a little different light on this.

I want to encourage folks who come here to post your comments, suggestions, questions, or opinions. I plan to discuss topics like this, review some of the new ECM technologies coming to market including the Open Source offerings, and engage in conversations with whoever wants to talk about the market.

I look forward to chatting…

Big Changes At Sun Microsystems

SUN CEO Steps Down After 22 Years at Helm. After much speculation over the last several weeks Scott McNealy has finally stepped down. It will be interesting to see if Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president who will retain his current position and take over as chief executive take the helm and steers Sun toward the ECM market.

I am anxious to see if my predictions regarding Sun from my article, Document Management for FREE: An Update come true: "I predict that the following major ECM vendors will dominate the market: IBM, Oracle, EMC/Documentum, and maybe a fourth that could be lead by Sun assuming they acquire additional content management technology from an ECM vendor like FileNET or OpenText, and, finally, Microsoft. The remaining smaller vendors will focus on niche offerings but the majority of ECM customers will be migrating toward the remaining big four or five ECM leaders."

Maybe Jonathon has been reading my articles from AIIM EDOC Magazine  

I Will Be At AIIM

AIIM Expo, 15-18 May 2006, Philadelphia, PA
Applied information Sciences and their  subsidiary Compliance Solutions Group are pleased be an invited partner in the Microsoft Solutions pavilion at AIIM Expo. This expo is the leading industry event for enterprise content management (ECM), which encompasses the technologies and strategies used to capture, manage, share and store documents and digital content. These technologies can help you take your ever-increasing information assets – whether structured or unstructured – and align them with core business processes in order to improve your organization’s performance and comply with governmental regulations.

Enterprise Search – Usually An Afterthought

I had a great lunch with a friend of mine, Martin Garland, yesterday to get caught up on what he's been up to. Martin is really interesting and has his hand in several areas of the ECM business including heading up conceptSearching which provides some very interesting search technology Some of the capabilities provided include the following:

• Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing
• Relevance Ranking based on Probabilistic Model (Bayesian Inference)
• Concept identification based on Shannon's Information Theory
• Cross platform compatibility via Web Services All Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) based on XML
• Transparent access to system internals including the statistical profile of terms

This technology becomes very relevant when you start looking at the exponentially growing quantities of unstructured content and the difficulty users have when attempting to find information. Traditional structure style Boolean search expressions begin to break down when looking for patterns within documents. The difficulties are compounded if there is uncertainty about the presence of documents and the exercise is designed to gather evidence, or to prove the absence of, information about the selected topic.Things can be improved when adding metadata to provide context for the documents and how they are used within the business. One of the new products that I plan to get a demonstration of Monday that really excited me is their conceptRuleBuilder. conceptRuleBuilder offers users a web based interface that enables domain experts to easily review and maintain taxonomy nodes, without the need for IT literacy. By establishing a taxonomy that reflects the way the organization is using information search accuracy is improved and the way users interact with the information can be improved.

I will provide an update after I get an updated demonstration of both conceptSearching and conceptRuleBuilder.