The project in question has weathered some turbulence – execution delays, budget overruns and most critically, lack of end user enthusiasm for the delivered solution.  

At the surface level, they seemingly did everything right and all the boxes can be safely checked off. However, careful reflection reveals that they ended up where they ended up and not where they wanted because of the disconnect between Marketing and IT. In this instance, marketing drove the project with the assistance of a 3rd party integrator, and the internal IT team was not fully on-board till very late in the game. Important issues like global training, scaling up, ongoing support and service levels were left as an afterthought.

Suffice it to say a sound DAM (or for that matter, any IT) project requires all stakeholders to be aligned from the beginning or else you'll end up with bad karma, and a system that is not fully adopted.

In addition to our cornerstone evaluations of technology vendors, in our DAM Report you will also find sage counsel about the pitfalls that you'll encounter during your DAM project life cycle. While attaining DAM Nirvana is a difficult goal, we at RSG do our bit by at least pointing you in the right direction.

Had any enlightenment of your own recently? Tell us about your experience.

It is not a big financial deal ($50 million US) -- but still significant for Lexmark if previous experience is any guide. The company has tried agressively to take Perceptive beyond its comfortable North American home market and raise its stature in case management-centric industries such as Government and Healthcare worldwide. 

From Perceptive's perspective Pallas-Athenas has some interesting products, "BPMone" being the flagship. What differentiates this product from other small BPM vendors is its focus on process mining and analytics, capabilities more often found in much more expensive product sets that target Case Management. I think the challenges here are going to not only be the obvious one of integrating two disparate product sets (BPMone  will make little sense as a standalone product at Lexmark) but rather in selling Case Management to Lexmark's existing customer base of SMBs (small and medium businesses).  Of course, it doesn't matter to me whether Lexmark is successful here or not. 

What is of concern and interest to me is the rapid rise in demand for process-driven Case Management in larger organizations. This is an application-based approach to Document Management that has come with  an equally rapid drop in interest in using the same software as an enterprise platform. The E in ECM is quickly becoming anachronistic, with a back-to-basics approach from buyers of the technology. Buyers seems to be saying, "To hell with my broad enterprise needs, I have a very specific problem  -- application processing, accounts payable, contract management, and so on -- and I want it fixed now."

Case Management applications theoretically answer that call by building on workflow and document management technology. This is not something particularly new, but in the past building such applications was massively complex and an onerous task to take on at all. But there have been huge improvements over the past couple of years in terms of basic usability, a move toward configuration over customization, and most importantly insight (via analytics) into active and planned processes. Together these make Case Management relatively easy to use and able to deliver some kind of value on the initial investment. Case Management is a trend I don't see falling off soon, but then again everything is cyclic -- like the size of a collar or the length of a skirt. In a few years time perhaps disillusionment will have set in and we will be back to talking about document management as an infrastructure component once again...

The answer people always prefer is of course, "Actually quite a lot, we've been working in this sector for a while."  By sector I mean industry "vertical," such as manufacturing, retailing, banking, insurance, healthcare, and so forth.  If you understand my business you are a part of my world; if you do not then no matter how clever you may be, you will always be an outsider.

That's basic, yet in the world of content management it's not a message or practice that is commonly followed. Most vendors try (with mixed success) to sell to anyone and everyone.  They argue that the technology is "horizontal" as opposed to "vertical," and that it will work equally well in any industry.  There is a validity to this argument, particularly in the world of web publishing.

Nevertheless the more complex the underlying business process the more the need for somebody who understands your business, My goal here is not to give business advice to sellers of technology, but rather to posit the opinion that buyers are quite right to have a heavy bias toward those that understand their specific industry.

True, most organizations are nothing like as unique as they think they are. Once you have seen one transactional document process you have to some extent seen them all. Likewise one media heavy website is much like another.  Further, the underlying technology used in these situations may have different branding, but they tend to be very similar at core. 

The difference and the value is in detail.  Whether you call it a document, content, a case item, a record, or a deliverable matters. Whether you navigate via product types and sub-types or locations and offerings matters.  As a buyer you want your content management system, sites, and services to be better than your competition; you also want it to be comparable to the competition.  Familiarity matters.  You want to work with a supplier that you can understand, that has an intimate understanding of your world and concerns.  Suppliers you can have conversations with, and and built a long term relationship with. 

The horizontal approach to selling and buying technology makes a lot of sense in the consumer world, but much less so in the enterprise.  The one size fits all mentality seldom works, though that does not stop a lot of suppliers from pursuing any and every opportunity no matter how far outside of their typical market reach and comfort zone. 

It's why we at the Real Story Group consider vertical expertise to be an important factor in our ECM product evaluations, for example.  A vendor might have a great technical solution but zero knowledge of the insurance sector (for example) will often rule them as unsuitable to a insurance-focused buyer.  Speeds and feeds are important, usability and functionality equally so, but a simple and genuine understanding of a buyer's world has just as much, if not more importance in the technology buying process.

To be clear, the concern with Autonomy from a buyer's perspective is less the technology on offer, which is typically decent stuff, but rather the quality and depth of service and support that comes with Autonomy's technology. The level of research and development funds that get allocated to these individual products in an ever growing and overlapping portfolio also represents a concern.

Though I don't find anything much to get excited about within this particular acquisition, it is unlikely to be the last, and all criticism aside, Autonomy will remain an ever more important player in this sector.

So as a final caution, whether you employ our research services or someone else's, you need to be particularly careful to figure out the real status and future roadmap of any Autonomy product before signing on the dotted line.

• Key take-aways
• Introduction
• Key Factors that Determine Whether SharePoint Is Right for You
• Conclusion

Records Management is becoming an increasingly hot topic for SharePoint as the volume of critical business information residing in SharePoint sites and collections grows, and I hope our advisory paper will add constructively to that discussion. However, it's not a topic that gets discussed much outside of hardcore RM circles, though inside those RM circles it's a raging debate.  Questions have been raised about SharePoint's basic approach to RM, including concerns over what some experts see as fundamental flaws in the design. (We assess those flaws in the advisory.)

Of course, like everything else in SharePoint, there are third-party vendors that can sell you add on modules for RM. But the majority of SharePoint implementers, consultants, and integrators understand little of RM or of its importance. Hence it's not too surprising that flaws can potentially slip through the cracks, and that SharePoint continues to fall short for RM. 

But things change, and when Interwoven was itself acquired by UK-based Autonomy in early 2009 the world of WorkSite was due for a major shake up. For example:

• The Microsoft-centric WorkSite product is now tied to a Java-centric workflow system called Autonomy Process Manager (formerly Cardiff LiquidOffice)
• WorkSite itself has been "IDOL-ized" - i.e., had its search guts removed and replaced with Autonomy technology
• There are big changes afoot regarding the Records Management elements of WorkSite

iManage WorkSite is the closest thing Autonomy has to an ECM Suite offering within in its broad portfolio of products (over 40 at present), but its certainly not the only Autonomy product of interest for document and records management. Navigating that product set remains a challenge, particularly when general compliance requirements need to be met.

Customers face still more difficulty penetrating the marketing-speak at Autonomy around "meaning based computing" -- an interesting concept for sure, but not one that immediately makes sense or seems relevant to many buyers.

In just a year, a lot has happened to WorkSite as we detail in our updated product evaluation of iManage WorkSite, just released this week. Anyone interested in buying or upgrading WorkSite would be well advised to check it out.

Today I was asked by one of our advisory customers whether they should be concerned about the state of Autonomy, who were a short-list candidate in their RFP process.  It was a great question, but a tricky one to answer. So how did I answer?  Well, there's several issues here: 

• First off, most of us who watch Autonomy have been expecting this for a long time -- as their level of growth against the grain was largely unsustainable, even given their rapid pace of acquisitions
• Valuation swings like this are not necessarily indicative of shifts in product and support quality
• Though their market cap has dropped, Autonomy has a huge war chest of cash, and are a $1B company; so they are highly unlikely to go under or frankly even suffer much -- other than the owners' share valuation is worth less than it was a few days back.
• The longstanding iManage document management product is solid, with a large and loyal installed base likely to keep the product viable in one form or another regardless
• All that being said, Autonomy could themselves be acquired at some point

But then I veered off on a tangent (not like me at all...), and noted that when vendors like Autonomy are on a shortlist it's important to evaluate them differently than a vendor who offers a single, focused product offering (i.e., most ECM and WCM firms).  Autonomy is a big company -- big because it has grown via multiple acquisitions, often of vendors that themselves grew via acquisition.

Take for example the iManage product that my client was inquiring about.  iManage started out as an innovative Silicon Valley startup, who then got bought by web content management goliath Interwoven, who in turn got acquired by Autonomy.  So in evaluating Autonomy as a potential supplier, a sound question to ask is whether this is just a bid by Autonomy to sell you all sorts of stuff (and they have a lot of stuff), or whether this bid is actually driven by the rump iManage team. If the latter then they may be worth serious consideration. If the former then they should quickly get the heave-ho.

Another question one might ask is how well-loved is this product within Autonomy's huge portfolio of offerings? Take for example Meridio, a successful software firm from Northern Ireland that had carved out a solid niche for itself, particularly in records management for SharePoint environments. At one point the rumor mill was rife with gossip that Microsoft themselves would buy Meridio, such was the fervent manner in which Redmond was apt to recommend Meridio to its enterprise customers. As it turned out Microsoft did not buy Meridio; instead Autonomy did. Since then Meridio has continued operate out of Northern Ireland, but they and their product have hardly set the world alight. We see Meridio less and less in the marketplace, and Microsoft now recommends their own records management functionality rather than Meridio's.  Autonomy then bought another record management system when they acquired Interwoven in 2009, and then subsequently in 2010 bought CA's records management products.

Does Autonomy need all these different record management systems? Nope of course not, but when you acquire and acquire and acquire bundles of technology, by default you end up with overlap. And sadly there is only so much love to go around, and there's doesn't seem to be a lot going Meridio's way these days.

OK, I'm picking here on Autonomy, but these kind of considerations are common enough in the enterprise software world. A big, strong vendor is no guarantee that the product you are buying from them is equally strong. And even though most vendors in the ECM space are relatively small, a handful of big vendors tend to dominate.  Thus, the way we would go about assessing a bid from Autonomy would be equally valid of a bid from Oracle, IBM, HP, or Open Text: look at the product group more than the vendor.

This is of course complete and utter rubbish. SharePoint sites continue to grow unabated,  and nobody has even started to deal properly with e-mail as a record, let alone the plethora of technologies that Web 2.0 encompasses. You can certainly find examples of brave souls who have made progress if you look hard enough, but they are the equivalent of a few grains of sand on a beach.

Legal has zero clue what IT actually does (beyond provide a poor quality helpdesk). Records Managers have nobody's ear but the RM community. Business thinks it knows best and listens to no one. Ironically the vendor community is for once the voice of reason here. Strip away the marketing hype, and vendors have made huge progress (as our research details) to deliver solutions that can actually provide excellent ERM capabilities in today's highly fragmented and ever growing enterprises. Although product offerings vary subantially among individual vendors, the problem does not lie with the technology.

What matters, more, though, is who's going to fix the situation? More specifically, where does one start to fix something that is so terribly broken?

In my personal opinion the place to start is at the beginning, and to question ERM's "raison d'etre."  Once upon a time office workers made use of filing clerks, who in turn made use of  cabinets, folders, and file plans. Information was managed, and no one needed to know the magic behind it, it just worked.  When you needed to get hold of a piece of information the filing clerk would get it for you, and when you needed to dispose of information the filing clerk would likewise oblige. When you moved onto better things or fell under the proverbial bus, you did so safe in the knowledge that the next person could pick up (information-wise at least) where you left off.  Not so in today's office: information gets lost, information gets hoarded unnecessarily, and when you transition upward or onward, you often leave the equivalent of an information black hole behind you.

The role of managing information through its lifecycle to destruction is arguably more relevant, vital, and important today than it has ever been, but who's responsibility is it? Records Managers are considered impractical and out of touch with modern reality, IT is clueless but sounds clever ("don't worry it's all backed up....."). Business listens to no one; instead they believe they have the task in hand via their zip drives and desktop search.

I am not sure if my need to rant today is connected in someway to the recent discovery online of a photograph of myself from my days in the Army, and my subsequent visit to the Military Museum in Winchester. In turn possibly stirring up a deep seated need to rally the troops, or more likely in my case to start an armed insurrection. But whatever it is, I do passionately believe that the time is long overdue to have a battle royale over what ERM should be, as opposed to what it currently is or is not. A clean slate is required, and fresh ideas based on the reality of overwhelming volumes of information are essential to the debate.

To give a practical example, a healthcare professional will need awareness of all the documents related to a particular patient. These documents and records are sorted and managed through their lifecycle as a "Case" even though they may reside in different locations, have different owners, other relationships, and different retention policies.  Other individuals may also need to interact with these documents for the purposes of billing or insurance. Same documents, different purpose. There may also be multiple legal and compliancy requirements to attend to.

In theory at least, Case Management provides you with the tools to pre-define and orchestrate those requirements. Permissions, rules, metadata, and processes all play a part in what can be a highly complex system. 

For some organizations, Case Management applications built from ECM platforms form the core of their business, and more will in the future. The need to better manage the massive volumes of transactional documentation is growing more acute, and Case Management will certainly play an increasingly important role. 

Yet almost more than any other scenario, Case Management demands good information governance and squeaky clean relevant data. Without it everything falls apart. The fact that so many organizations are lacking here is another key reason Case Management is not as widely deployed as it could be. 

Selecting the right software to meet your Case Management needs is difficult, since everyone claims to do it,  but very few do it well.  The nightmare scenario for a buyer of a Case Management system is to buy a vanilla ECM software system and then just bring in a .NET or Java developer. You are not only buying technical functionality you should also be buying deep and very specific domain expertise, and without the right combination of the two you can be in trouble quick.

ECM vendors such as Hyland, Objective, Open Text, EMC, Autonomy and IBM all have deep expertise and knowledge in the particular industry sectors that they design systems for (Pharma, Legal, Government, Intelligence, Healthcare, Insurance,  Law Enforcement, Retail etc). They know (mostly) what works and what does not, and they understand industry specific business processes right down to the task level. You are paying as much for that knowledge, as you are for their software.

Assuming though that you do have your document house in order, and already utilize Case Management, there are some interesting developments on the near horizon -- most notably the use of business intelligence and analytics tools to extract further value from what is already a rich information set.  Consider the possibilities of early fraud and discrepancy detection or new and emerging trend analysis from the very rich data within your documents.  BI has long been locked solely into the 20% of data that is structured in the enterprise, and is a valued tool set. But very large and clean volumes of documentation that have been given a tight structure can be mined these days too, and those documents theoretically at least, represent the other 80% of the data we deal with in business.  In fact some organizations are already starting to use tools like Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects in Case Management deployments, and they are liking what they see.

And remember it's our job here to ensure that technology buyers make the right decisions via the use of our research, and one of the best ways for us to do that is to continuously talk with buyers and users who are at the coalface.  So if you are an organization that is using Case Management along with some kind of BI tool, then  I would love to chat with you in confidence to hear more about what works and what does not just drop me a note and we can chat.

Ironically, it's early days for a combination of technologies that have been with us separately for many years. Yet this could prove to be a very good long term marriage.

Though not really a surprise that Documentum wants to build up its Case Management credentials in this burgeoning area (just think Healthcare, Government, Litigation and Insurance), it's far from clear why anyone would chose EMC Documentum over any other vendor's Case Management offering.

Case Management solutions vary widely, from pretenders to fully fledged players. Everyone from Autonomy to FabaSoft to Oracle has an offering,  There are even some third-party options available for SharePoint. But how each vendor approaches Case Management differs, since specific buyer requirements differ widely too.  Some enterprise buyers seek good BPM capabilities,  while others seek complex metadata management services, records management and retention or even the relative ability to manage files that can range from physical items through to rich media in the same context.  

There is much talk amongst consultants and vendors of the "commoditization" of ECM, but I see little evidence of that in the real world.  Sure, anyone can offer you check in/out and version control and workflow -- but not everyone does those things well, or even adequately -- and some do them too well and deliver you complete confusion and overkill.

One thing is for sure: one size most definitely does not fit all for Case Management.  Therefore, any buyer without a very solid handle on their business requirements and processes is walking into a selection minefield.

As for EMC Documentum, I gave up trying to understand their ever changing strategy(ies) some time back.  From once being the clear market leader they are now in an ever more crowded and ever more specialized and complex field (we cover about 30 in our evaluation research).  That said, EMC Documentum continues to be a key player, and we will continue to evaluate them, and on occasion recommend them to some advisory clients, assuming Documentum makes sense for that client's very specific needs.

People outside of highly regulated environments typically assume that records and retention management in sectors like healthcare, financial services, and energy is state of the art.  This is far from the case.

Most often Records Management is underfunded,  inadequately resourced, and unloved.  It is no cliche to say it is also often run from underground, literally in basements out of sight of those who need to do "real work." 

In places where records are actively managed, they are usually managed well, with detailed and well-maintained file plans and retention schedules.  But many organizations only manage a fraction of the records they should be.  For example very few records management departments include e-mail as part of their remit, yet e-mail is where all the "stuff" happens. 

But maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn.

Here at the Real Story Group we currently support a number of large advisory customers who are looking at records management strategically across highly complex working environments.  We have others who are looking at the whole issue of information management and ECM more strategically than in the past, and have begun to include RM as a component or a recognized future element of their work. 

That might not sound like much, but just a year or so ago it seemed like nobody cared.  Things like e-government initiatives, healthcare reform, demand or need for more self-service applications, increased regulations, and so forth seldom have the immediate impact people expect. And in a world where decisions can get driven by today's opinion polls, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that many of the biggest and most profound changes we encounter in our society occur at a far slower pace.

The most overused phrase in my personal lexicon is, "time will tell." But I fervently hope that time will tell us that awareness of the importance of RM and archiving has slowly risen to the fore.

To quote:

Workflow services can help minimize the cost and time required to coordinate common approval processes -- but only if the service does what you want it to do, and users don't "work around" the system....

Subscribers to our WCM and DAM research streams can download the workflow paper here.

The launch of Apple's iPad last week has caught the imagination of armchair critics worldwide:

"What's it for?"

"What a funny name (snigger snigger)"

"It's just a big iPhone"

And so on.  But whether the Apple device itself is a success or not, we seem to be approaching a tipping point for improved user interfaces to manage documents.

Be it the Kindle, Tablet, Nook, or iPad, keyboardless document reader devices are on the verge of becoming mainstream -- at least for consumers. For browsing and reading through large volumes of files, or large documents containing multiple pages (books and libraries), such devices are infinitely more user friendly than the current desktop or laptop paradigm.

Take that one step further and it is logical to reach the conclusion that such devices might work well for reading through airliner maintenance manuals, consulting documentary evidence in court,  searching archives, or accessing a patient's medical records and images?  So while the pundits mock the iPad, I see real potential here for the world of case, document and records management.  That said, I already own too many Apple devices, and may have just drunk too much Apple-flavored Kool Aid. But surely it can only be time before some enterprising vendor starts to deliver secure organizational and access applications for these devices.

I for one wish them luck, for as somebody who has spent his career digging through virtual crates, accessing electronic files that I then need to print to actually read, I know for sure that there has to be a better way.

Also, the title “taxonomist” should die – as it pushes people into the mindset of fixed hierarchies and navigations, despite over a decade of efforts to change that. Evolve the title, I say, into a metadata architect, or an information cartographer. Those are far more descriptive of what this role must be -- and for the more savvy, already is -- as we move into the next decade.

Metadata architects can no longer get away with being topic generalists, they must be specialists in the industry content they’re refining and understand the end-user: what are the specialized topics that perhaps aren’t contained in content, that can’t be extracted, that would make knowledge workers more efficient? Another customer I met with this week, a large French government agency, pointed out the main thing their search tool couldn’t extract meaning from was acronyms. “We had to make a list of all the acronyms we use,” said the IT director. “Once we spelled out the acronyms, what they stood for and their synonyms, the software worked beautifully.”

Taking taxonomies beyond what technology can achieve on its own is the metadata architect’s challenge for the next decade, because technology is at the point where it achieves what taxonomists were doing a decade ago.

For buyers of technology, remember that different entity extraction and search tools are often geared towards different kinds of content; we detail this in our Search & Information Access product evaluation research. There’s also higher and lower-risk scenarios for allowing technology to do more vs. less work. Legal firms should have more categorization checks from a metadata architect or a content specialist, less so than a news agency where topics are more wide-reaching and less fraught with risk if an end-user doesn’t find something.

As I’m based in Europe this quarter, I’ll be missing Taxonomy Boot Camp in San Jose, CA for the first time in several years. Last year, the opening session devolved into a debate as to how to define a taxonomy and a taxonomist. This year, I propose embracing a new era of metadata architects, ones that work with technology rather than be willfully ignorant of its inner workings. It’s only by studying the “how” of technology just as much as the “what” of the content that we’ll get to the next stage of content management, search, and information access.
 

1. Information Management
2. Gather: Identification, Preservation, and Collection
3. Filter: Processing, Review, and Analysis
4. Present: Production and Presentation

Certainly, EMC's bread and better has long been piece #1: "Information Management" in terms of storage, document management, and records management. In April, EMC made an attempt at addressing pieces 2-4 through its announcement of SourceOne. Unfortunately, the SourceOne portfolio was a disjointed collection of re-branded EMC products, stand-alone point solutions, and partner-owned solutions.

SourceOne is comprised of:

• SourceOne E-mail Management: the rebranded version of EMC EmailXtender that provides e-mail archiving and management capabilities (but lacking in e-discovery capabilities - like legal holds on e-mails - as we note in the E-mail Archiving and Management Report)
• Discovery Manager: fills some e-discovery holes of the SourceOne E-mail Management by providing the ability to apply legal holds on e-mails
• Discovery Collector: service from EMC partner (and Kazeon competitor) StoredIQ, that specializes in the "Gather" piece of the EDRM.

The SourceOne mish-mash could not adequately meet many enterprises' needs of an end-to-end e-discovery solution.

As students of our E-Discovery course know, while many products that bill themselves as "e-discovery solutions," very few, if any, satisfy the entire EDRM spectrum. In reality each e-discovery product is stronger in one area and weaker in another. For buyers, the trick is finding the product that best satisfies their unique e-discovery needs. For some enterprises, cobbling together a best of breed Gather-specialist, Filter-specialist, and Present-specialist makes sense, but many enterprises need a comprehensive end-to-end solution.

EMC undoubtedly recognized this desire and purchased Kazeon which offers functionality across the Gather, Filter, and Present pieces of the EDRM spectrum. This certainly allows EMC to check more e-discovery boxes, but buyers should be aware that Kazeon's strength is clearly in the early "Gather" stage of the EDRM where it can index content across multiple repositories. Beyond the Identification stage its capabilities tend to be weaker compared to other solutions.

EMC says that Kazeon will now become part of SourceOne. Combined with EMC's Information Management capabilities, this marriage has the potential to deliver a fairly comprehensive solution to many enterprises.

For customers, though, the forthcoming challenge to integrate their Information Management capabilities with Kazeon should not be underestimated. For example, how will an enterprise integrate Kazeon across their Documentum and e-mail repositories? Kazeon's ability to be deployed as an appliance is surely one of the reasons EMC decided to buy. Any enterprise integration poses challenges, but with the security and legal issues that come with e-discovery, the issues here tend to be greater and more serious.

The inclusion of the acquisition within the "Content Management and Archiving Division" of EMC is a good sign. Hopefully, for buyers, this time around integration and a total end-to-end solution will become a high-priority.

One small point of annoyance with this particular announcement is that it claims the iPhone integration to be the first of its kind. It's not, and in the spirit of debunking myths let me just remind the PR folk at Autonomy of the following:

• The Wireless DMS Suite for the iPhone from Matrix Logic
• The MST iPhone viewer from MST Technologies
• The open source iPhone Navigator for Alfresco
• The Dav-E based iPhone connection for Xythos
• The ReaddleDocs iPhone application

But of more interest than the iPhone integration itself was the return of the name "iManage." For those of you who have been around a while you may remember that iManage was a silicon valley start up that slightly mistimed its IPO and failed to make the huge sums of money that companies like Interwoven had done just a year or two before. In fact Interwoven -- a firm that had pioneered the Web Content Management mini-boom -- acquired iManage in 2003, and the iManage name was subsequently dropped. What followed was one firm (Interwoven) and two brands, TeamSite and WorkSite.

Now it seems that Autonomy is reviving the iManage brand, and effectively giving the iManage rump their independence back. The truth is the iManage team was never fully integrated into the Interwoven collection, so there is sense to this. There is also the fact that WorkSite suffered a bit at Interwoven, where the first and foremost passion was for WCM (TeamSite). Now under Autonomy's ownership WorkSite is likely to see a lot more love and attention, particularly around the areas of E-discovery and Compliance. Time will (as always) tell how it all will pan out, but, (as always) you can rest assured you will get "The Real Story" here.

Within that service we cover XML authoring tools: the software for creating and editing highly complex documentation, be it DITA structured technical documentation, complex translation work, or product information designed for multiple re-use. But our research goes beyond the editing and authoring options at the front end, and evaluates all the leading CCM (Component Content Management) tools that have been designed to manage the publishing and workflow of these complex XML document components throughout their lifecycle.

On other occasions we separate technologies into different categories, where others may have bundled them together. An obvious case here is our Web Content Management research and our Enterprise Content Management Suites research. Just in the past fortnight I have been asked by more than one person why we have two subscription services for the same technology. Well the simple answer is that it is not the same technology: the technology to manage outward (web) facing content and sites, versus the technology to manage inward-facing (documents and files) content and filing systems is quite different. But nevertheless it is a very fair question to ask, because to someone outside the industry (and even some insiders) that distinction is not always obvious.

Confusion can come about due to vendor branding strategies or a plethora of nebulous acronyms used within the industry. For example Interwoven (recently acquired by Autonomy) did a good job of branding their WorkSite (document & files) offering quite separately from their TeamSite (web content) offering. Other vendors such as EMC Documentum or Open Text use a single brand moniker (such as "digital media") to cover all their content-focused software offerings regardless of each component's specific purpose, while in other instances product names can even be synoymous with the firm's brand, as with ADAM and Sitecore.

Then there is the issue of acronyms. We use the term ECM as it is the most commonly used term for document-based technologies, however in different regions and industry segments ECM is referred to as EDMS, EDM, EDRM, Document Control, IM, IDM even KM. As an advisory firm we have to call our research and services something, and we are faced with picking and choosing amongst a myriad of terms, typically choosing the most well-known term currently in use.

Our job at CMS Watch is to make sense of the complexity of the technology offerings out there for you, the buyer - and that can be a challenge at the best of times. We believe it's safe to say that we have more research available to our subscribers on content technologies than all of our competitors combined. But volume, depth and breadth is not all that separates us from our competitors, we are in addition avowedly a firm that follows the market rather than "makes" it. Thus, we don't try and come up with new acronyms, terminology or market segments, we don't cheerlead for the industry or get involved in market sizing, we stick to the basics of evaluating current release products side by side and evaluating the importance of current trends.

So here is my challenge to you. We evaluate over 200 products and sub-divide those into 10 subscription services, which in turn are sub-divided into about 5-8 sub-categories each. We try to use common terminology so that you the buyer can relate to and locate the research that meets your needs, but that does not always work as well as it could. So if you find the product evaluation(s) you need, but locate them in a place - or grouped in a way you find 'surprising' or 'interesting', let us know. Tell us how you and your colleagues perceive these technologies, what you call them, how you would categorize them differently, how you explain them to your internal clients or project teams. Truly we would love to hear from you as this industry remains a dynamic and very moveable feast at times....

The question that arose at the end of the day was, "what is it going to take for Digital Asset Management (and related technologies) to match the adoption of Enterprise Content Management and Web Content Management today?"

There are a variety of reasons for why DAM will finally become a priority. I'm afraid one such reason is legal action. Like many things in life, people don't take things seriously until they get in trouble. We have seen many cases where litigation has spawned action to manage e-mails, records, documents, and even web content. With the explosion of digital media within enterprises, the chances that pertinent evidence resides in an audio, video, or image file is greater and greater. If you were sued, would you be able to search through all of your digital assets to find relevant evidence?

Among a variety of functionalities, the need to respond to litigation will undoubtedly challenge a DAM system's capabilities with regards to metadata, search, and rights management. As readers of the Digital Asset Management Report know, digital rights management in particular remains a weak point among most of the products we cover. Litigation will likely cause buyers to demand better rights management in the near future. Unfortunately for some, their current systems are not going to suffice as presently implemented.

Even if you are managing digital assets in your enterprise, are you prepared to put a formal "hold" on the assets in the system? Does your e-discovery technology integrate with your DAM system? As students of our E-Discovery online education course know, e-discovery can be expensive, time-consuming, and painful when dealing with something as seemingly simple as e-mails. It is much more difficult when the smoking gun is embedded in some video.

It's time for enterprises to get serious about properly managing their digital assets just like they are (or should be) doing with other enterprise content.

No, I'm not going to argue what penalty should be imposed for using performance-enhancing drugs – I'll leave that to sports talk radio. I'm also not going to get into the legalities of someone leaking medical information to a journalist – I'll leave that to the authorities. I will, however, argue that the alleged evidence that Alex Rodriguez tested positive for a drug test in 2003 should never have been able to be leaked in the first place.

In 2003, the Major League Baseball Players Association agreed to player testing in order for Major League Baseball to determine what percentage of players were using performance-enhancing drugs. The union made this agreement under the terms of complete anonymity; the names of those testing positive were never to be revealed. The Union assured its constituency that once the percentage of positive results was determined, the results would be permanently destroyed.

But, according to multiple Sports Illustrated sources, this list of players who tested positive does exist. It was never destroyed. We often hear of incidents where medical records are not properly destroyed and patients’ confidential information is somehow found – either in a dumpster or on a rogue laptop. It is a medical office's responsibility to its patients to emplace policies and procedures for the proper destruction of information. Similarly, it was the MLB Players union's responsibility to abide by their own promises and destroy the documents in a timely manner.

As readers of The ECM Suites Report and students of our E-Discovery Online Certificate Education Course know, the issue of proper destruction of information gets even more complicated when technology comes into play. It's too late for Alex Rodriguez to investigate his union's governance policies and procedures, but what about your enterprise? How can you be certain that you are responsibly destroying information about your customers/partners/employees? If you were involved in a legal action and a subsequent e-discovery effort, what would investigators find in your content management systems, databases, hard drives, and e-mails?

Does your enterprise have a clear policy in place for destroying information in compliance with proper regulations? Does your enterprise have a way of ensuring that these policies were followed correctly? Does your destruction policy include a certificate of destruction? Does it include an audit trail of everyone who viewed the information?

I would never wish this sort of legal imbroglio on anyone, but I'll take some comfort though that A-Rod will be spending at least some of his off-season thinking about records management when he should be thinking about how he's going to deal with Red Sox pitching...

More and more, IT teams are finding themselves entangled in legal webs as legal actions spawn electronic discovery efforts. E-discovery can quickly become a costly and time-intensive activity -- and can put immense strain on an enterprise's business as usual. So much so, that many enterprises choose to simply settle cases in order to avoid the costly, and often painful, process altogether. Adding to the pain of an e-discovery process is the confusing marketplace of technologies that are classified as "e-discovery" tools. These can range from everything from search engines to full-blown case management tools.

Today we added our newest course, "The Fundamentals of E-Discovery" to our ever-expanding curriculum of online courses. Our hope is that this course will give you the basics that you should know before beginning an e-discovery project and help you minimize your risk by taking a pro-active approach to e-discovery. Armed with these fundamentals, you will be able to help your team see how e-discovery technology can be an essential part of the solution, but not the solution alone.

Some customers I have been chatting to recently are stoked about the deal. In the legal sector, Lexis Nexis is the research tool. It dominates. In a sense the announcement is no more than a statement that you can now access Lexis Search Advantage services within Interwoven's own Universal Search client. But to those who use both systems every day (and there are a lot of them) it means much more.

It's a pragmatic approach, one that some other vendors would do well to note. Rather than trying to be more Web 2.0 than the next guy, or following whatever trend that the analyst firms predict CIO's will be hot under the collar about in 2010, why not just ask your customers what they want, then listen and respond?

Based on what I saw at the Search Summit, there seems to be a renewed awareness, at ever-higher levels in the corporate responsibility chain, that in a litigious business environment "enterprise search" is not just a knowledge-management tactic or a productivity aid, but a survival imperative. You will be sued some day. (It's not a matter of "if," but when.) During the discovery phase of the suit, you're going to provide (and also receive from the other side) bewilderingly immense amounts of data. Without good search technology, sifting through the data isn't just tedious but nightmarishly expensive.

I didn't get a chance to attend any e-discovery sessions at the Search Summit. It didn't matter. At lunch, I happened to sit down next to litigation technology consultant (and ESS presenter) Jeff Flax. We had an illuminating chat about search and discovery in the context of records retention.

Flax noted that many companies that have records retention policies aren't following them. He sees a "pack rat" syndrome: a tendency to let expired records remain in the morgue past the "save-till" date. The problem with this is that files that have been declared obsolete or marked for disposition, but have not yet been physically destroyed, are still subject to subpoena. "A good lawyer will ask for expired documents during discovery," Flax notes.

Lawyers are also demanding data in its "native state": Not text dumps or PDFs or other derivative forms of the data, but the data as it actually exists. "If I'm a lawyer and I'm requesting someone's e-mails on a certain subject," says Flax, "I don't want the e-mails as text files, I want the original e-mail archive in binary form so I can pick apart the bits and get at all the header and footer and other information in context."

Sometimes physical media must be handed over in discovery so that deleted files can be detected and recovered. "I've seen cases where browser search queries from many years back, supposedly no longer on disk, have been recovered forensically," Flax told me. "And then certain keyword clumps are detected, and those query patterns can become admissible in court."

It turns out that the data in a search index (the index built by a search engine) can often be used to reconstruct a document even after the document itself has been irretrievably lost. Takeaway: A document can't be considered fully destroyed until you've destroyed its search-index data as well. (I wonder how many retention policies take this into account? Doubtless very few.)

If you're concerned about e-mail retention (and if you're not, you should be), you might want to look into our latest offering: The E-mail Archiving & Management Report 2008.You'll find that the report divides vendors (roughly) along three lines: policy-centric, archive-centric, and SaaS-based. (You can see a free sample here.)

My advice? Never pass up a chance to have lunch with a litigation technology expert. You'll be inundated with food for thought.

"What it says in the back-up policy is seldom what is actually happening"

"It can be near impossible to purge data once it is past retention"

"1GB of storage costs around 20 cents to buy -- 1GB of storage costs around $3,500 to review"

The basic principals -- of only managing and storing what is required, and of being as diligent about purging redundant and valueless data as in the preservation of records -- are central to ECM (Enterprise Content Management) and EAM (E-Mail Archiving and Management). The tools exist to help you do this, to dramatically lessen your management and storage needs, to improve your litigation readiness -- and frankly run a better information management environment and by default a more efficient business.

But the reality of the conflicts within enterprises -- the battles between IT and Business, between Legal and everyone else, the local turf wars, the lack of executive guidance and strategy -- leave most firms in a content hell-hole.

The quote of the day came from Andrew Drake, Senior Counsel at Nationwide "You have to ask....does your data truly belong where it sits today?" What a great question! I intend to steal that quote and use mercilessly in the future...

For starters it will come as a big relief to the very substantial customer base in the Legal sector that Hummingbird had built up before its late 2006 acquisition by Open Text. Secondly, it reaffirms Open Text's commitment to building on other repositories where sensible -- in this case Microsoft -- the platform that dominates Legal. Open Text was among the first to wake up and smell the coffee regarding the MOI (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM) vendors playing to own the repository layer and it makes good sense for them to continue focusing on applications going forward.

Like all the other major ECM vendors, Open Text is going through a period of considerable change. And as the company moves to integrate the many pieces of their portfolio together, they become an ever more interesting firm to watch. Open Text always had decent technology and always points to a very good-looking roadmap -- the issue with them has always been execution. This kind of announcement signals to potential buyers that the company intends to continue supporting its major product lines.