Insights from AIIM

The convention floor at the AIIM conference in Philadelphia March 30 to April 2 was considerably busier than one might have expected, given the sluggish economy. The news from exhibitors was good, with numerous reports of revenue growth and new hires. Customers were being offered more sophisticated, user-friendly products and many options for dealing with today’s business challenges. Here’s some advice KMWorld gleaned from a sampling of exhibitors.

Doculabs—Rich Medina, senior analyst

Six steps for creating a successful compliance program

First, you need an overall strategy based on your goals. Are you trying to address litigation readiness, regulatory requirements or other issues? Second, you need a plan for governance and operations, in terms of who will be responsible. Third, the information to be managed must be organized. Inventory your content, and setup a good taxonomy. Fourth, the organization should evaluate and possibly redesign relevant processes such as managing the records life cycle and e-discovery. Fifth, the information architecture needs to support all the functions required for compliance, including records management, enterprise content management and e-discovery. And lastly, the organization needs to establish a good change management plan for training and communication, in order to put your policies into practice.

Vital Path—Jay Rothe, president

Developing an enterprise content strategy

One of the biggest challenges in enterprise content management is the desire of various departments to maintain ownership over their content. The majority of content management systems are developed at the departmental level. Vital Path allows companies to unify their content into a single data model. It connects to over 40 different content management systems at the API level. The repositories can then be managed through one application, allowing federated records management and other centralized actions. Meanwhile, the original developers and owners of the content can maintain control over their respective repositories.

Clearview—Dan Smith, regional sales manager

Bringing content to the desktop

Users of content often want to work within familiar applications but still need to store content centrally. Clearview is tightly integrated with Microsoft SharePoint, and uses its native capabilities to manage documents, e-mail, forms and images. Putting content into Clearview is as simple as dragging and dropping files onto the IRISS desktop gadget. It is well suited to transactional environments such as mortgage application processing, because content from many sources can be combined. Users can work within any application, add content into Clearview and then see all the related information in one place. Clearview’s intelligent iFolders are also able to determine whether required content such as backup documentation is missing.

Alfresco—John Newton, chairman and CTO

Open source software for enterprise content management

Using open source software for enterprise content management is a new concept, and not everyone is comfortable with the idea. But companies can download it for free, and try it out. We provide the source code, and everything is transparent. Our metrics indicate that it’s five times faster than traditional closed systems, and 10 times cheaper. After being on the market for four years, Alfresco has about 90 percent of the functionality of proprietary products.