Document Management

By Chris Preimesberger

Hewlett-Packard announced March 31 that it will acquire privately held enterprise content management software maker Tower Software in a cash transaction.

The deal will give HP all the outstanding shares of the company in exchange for $3.39 (Aus.) per share. No other financial details were made available.

Tower, based in Canberra, Australia, but fielding about 240 employees around the world, was established in 1985 as a records management company dealing mostly with government offices and agencies, CEO Martin Harwood told eWEEK.

Data security and device security are two different things… sometimes we treat them as the same thing. When looking at document management… or any other content management for that matter, there are a few ways that we can keep our data secure.

For example. In a paper-based environment you might put your documents in a filing cabinet or on a shelf.

Your security is only as strong as the location you put them in. If you get too many documents to house, you might rent space at another facility and have them store the documents for you. If the documents are at your location, your building security keeps them safe. If they are off site, how do you know they are safe? How can you trust that your vendor will keep them as secure as you hope?

It is estimated that less than 20% of all records that have traditionally been paper-based have been converted to electronic formats. For example, according to AdvancedMD, only 10% - 15% of medical records are handled electronically.

This tells me that the paperless office is a myth and just a vision… we have a long way to go before we get there.

I found a case study on how a law office in Illinois is moving to a paperless environment. We have helped a few law offices here in town with the same type of conversion. Take a look at the case study titled Lawyers win document case.”

If you are smart, you’ll prepare for the event that you might need to be ready for electronic data discovery. I read an intereting post at Computer World. Robin Harris wrote a post called the Two-minute guide to Electronic Data Discovery. There is some pretty interesting points in there that I believe everyone responisble for data in a business should understand.

I think that this is a prime example of how IT and business managers really need to work together to be ready for eventualities in business especially when it comes to document management policies. One thing that struck me was that it is not IT responsibility to define data retention or destruction strategies. She made three important points:

• Your company’s lawyers and record management folks are responsible for setting electronic data retention policy - not IT
• IT must take the lead, working with policy makers, in architecting an economic and effective infrastructure to ensure compliance
• IT needs a documented process whose ownership lies outside IT for unscheduled data destruction - such as when a VP wants all their emails to a client deleted - and staff must be trained on it.

You may think that your PDF or Excel Document is secure… but… I lost a password for a PDF file and had to have it to make a quick edit. I did a search on Google and in about three minutes found a a little application that simply removes the password. No password, no problem. I got to thinking a little about it and wondered if password protection on an Excel document is any better. Nope… same thing. I did a quick search on Google and found that I could crack that password just as free. What is the solution? Well, if document security is that important, you really need to look at a document management system that tracks versions and changes. Then, if the change occurs, you can track it. Moreover, users have to have access into the document management system in the first place to be able to even access the file in the first place.

By Jim Murphy The enterprise content management (ECM) market is at a critical turning point where it must prove itself or be lost altogether. Over the last 20 years, widely disparate business demands for content management, the stubborn resistance of antiquated practices, widely different methods of handling content, technology growing pains, the slow maturation of standards, the whims of investment hype as money flits from document management to Web content management to Web 2.0, and conflicting definitions of what content management is, have led us to a rocky, complicated and still wildly dynamic vendor landscape. No matter how loudly the vendors tout the notion of a unified ECM system, no matter how many vendors consume each other, the ECM market has defied complete consolidation. Having covered the market for eight years, I’ve kept a simple list of every content management-related vendor that has crossed my desk, noting when they emerge, when they’re acquired or when they disappear. At 316 as I write this, the list grows daily.

ECM or Electronic Content Management allow for the storage of images and information on your network. Byron Aulick at Datavault posted an introduction to ECM at the Datavault Blog.

Enterprise Content Management, by definition, is the ability to gather, organize, and distribute corporate information, regardless of its original format. The ECM industry is rapidly becoming the most highly sought after service for 'Corporate America'. Having said that, let's first understand that ECM has no ‘vertical' market. Simply stated, this means that there is no one type of business served better than any other. ECM can help a medical facility handle its knowledge base just as quickly and efficiently as it can help an attorney's office manage their legal documents.

"A document management system (DMS) is a computer system (or set of computer programs) used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. The term has some overlap with the concepts of Content Management Systems and is often viewed as a component of Enterprise Content Management Systems and related to Digital Asset Management, Document imaging, Workflow systems and Records Management systems." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management