Realizing True Records Management with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 – the Webinar

I’ve just signed up for a webinar that KnowledgeLake are holding entitled “Realizing True Records Management with Microsoft SharePoint 2010“. 

KnowledgeLake were gold sponsors at the SharePoint Best Practices conference that I went to in London earlier this year, and, I have to say, it was a top-notch event. I had visited KnowledgeLake’s booth and I’m curious about how good their product actually is.

So, it was with interest that I read the “Reasons I should attend“. These included the following:

• LEARN how records management on SharePoint 2010 can lower cost and risk through transparent application of compliance policies and consistent disposition of content
• DISCOVER why SharePoint will succeed in records management where other ECM platforms have failed
• WATCH the demonstration of a document lifecycle in SharePoint: the capturing of paper and electronic files including email, application of metadata and classification criteria, search, retrieval, viewing and application of record declaration
• RECOGNISE how to outline an enterprise approach for the implementation of SharePoint 2010 records management
• HEAR the customer case study by MOEITS and how they are using SharePoint. The solution saved the union nearly $1 million and realised a return from their investment in four months.
• CONTRIBUTE to the Question and Answer session

Now, the first reason seems to be pretty standard when describing the virtues of any content management system. As is a demonstration, as well as hearing a customer case study..(Just change the name of the ECM system.)

What really grabbed me by the short and curlies was the second reason “Discover why SharePoint will succeed in records management where other ECM platforms have failed“. Now, this is interesting…I want to hear about this secret sauce that McSharePoint has.

Reason 4 is also one that got my attention. Here the phrase “enterprise approach” really stood out. I’ve been involved with SharePoint since 2007, and, coming from an ECM background, it was very evident to me that SharePoint 2010 is now being hawked as a bigger beast. And this is not only in the “functionality” of SharePoint 2010, but also in other ways. There are more “enterprise-level” whitepapers out now, and the official Microsoft SharePoint training is focusing more on the “business-side” rather than just pure technology.

I’ve registered for the webinar. I’ll be taking notes, and will try and report back on my findings.

Reference Links

• Realizing True Records Management with Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• KnowledgeLake
• European SharePoint Best Practices Conference 2011
  

Why Virtual Events Matter – a post by Daniel O’Leary

I have started watching the presentations from the AIIM Virtual Social Business Conference. Even though I was not able to “attend” the conference live, AIIM are making all the sessions available for a limited time.

Thanks to a twitter feed that was running at the conference, I saw that Daniel O’Leary, an “AIIM Capture Expert Blogger” had written an excellent post on the value of Virtual Events.

Here is a link to his post…Why Virtual Events Matter

 

Related articles

• I’ve just signed up for…The AIIM Social Business Virtual Conference (markjowen.wordpress.com)

John Mancini’s Keynote View of the Digital Future

John Mancini, President of AIIM International was kind enough to make a zipcast of his info360 keynote presentation slides. This allows him to do “present” his slides. I am very, very grateful that he did this, as I was not able to attend the conference.

I was really impressed by John’s comments. I made some “rough” notes.

(I call them “rough” because they don’t capture all of John’s message – If you want, scroll to the bottom of this post to see the link to his zipcast.)

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Rough Notes made from John Mancini’s keynote at Info360

We are in the middle of an interesting technology inflection point
—————————————————————-
We have been through many phases, each with its content management focus.

• Mainframe – Batch Transactions
• Mini – Departmental Processes
• PC – Documents
• Internet – Web pages

Effectively what we have done is just taken the old world of paper-based records, ledgers and transferred it to the next phase of technology. This may the the source of some of the challenges that we have.

The next iteration after the Internet will be “Social” – a focus on interactions and conversations. The content management focus will be capturing and managing these.

John mentions that companies can’t just put a social layer on top of their current processes. They will need to think about the social layer and how they embed it in all of their processes and push it back through our web presences and information repositories so that everything connects up. A system of engagement that just has a front-end social process and nothing else behind it is not enough.

John also points out that we need to avoid pushing just old world concepts into this social world. We will need to adapt these ideas, and ways of doing things. The old transactional ideas had to do with control, auditing and securing. This won’t be always possible in the new way.

Implications
————
CIO’s will need to approach things differently.

• Traditionally – Minimise Risk and Reduce Cost.
• The new is Add Value and Create New Reality

The end of the email era

John did an analysis of his e-mail:

• 46% was actually unwanted (spam);
• 21% was e-mails to colleagues – these could actually be better addressed with social media;
• 21% was bac’n (interesting, but not essential, can be deleted without any harm).
• The only things of real value were the e-mails sent to, and received from, real people outside of the organisation. This accounted for only 6% of total volume.

His point was – we need to think differently about e-mail. This is compounded by the fact that the people coming into the workforce are from the “social” phase, while the people making the decisions are from the “PC” phase.

The End of IT autocracy.

• 10 years – the coolest technology was was you got at work.
• Now that is reversed.
• Workplace IT is lagging behind.
• If a business imperative is important enough, it doesn’t matter how much IT control it, if going outside that control will allow a user to get the job done, people will do it.

Implication of Compounding

• Information growth will be incredible.
• At the same time the cost of storage is dropping.
• However this is not proportional. (Information growth exceeds decrease in cost).

Why we should care
——————-

• If we ignore this, we will make the same mistakes again. E.g. when e-mail came out, companies considered it a risk, and that it was really only needed for management, etc.
• However, companies need to embrace this technology to remain competitive. Otherwise there is a risk of a “digital divide”. The longer that it takes, the more difficult it will be.

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Link to John Mancini’s Zipcast

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Related Articles

• 10 ways to use Zipcast (slideshare.net)
• SlideShare Brings another collaboration tool to the crowded web conferencing market (zdnet.com)

Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Collaboration Alignment

Originally from “Enterprise Collaboration – What’s Your Problem?“

Related articles

• Social Collaboration to Spread Enterprise Wide (prweb.com)
• Inching Towards Enterprise 2.0 (serve4impact.com)
• The First Two Steps Toward Breaking Down Silos in Your Organization (blogs.hbr.org)
• Designing the Collaborative Enterprise (fastforwardblog.com)

We want Google!

One of the things I come across frequently when discussing client’s requirements for a new enterprise content management system is that they “want Google search”.

When I delve deeper I often discover that the client wants to be able to type one or two words in a small text box, and get back exactly the document that they were looking for.Within seconds.

Unfortunately what the client doesn’t always see, or is aware of, is that there is a lot of work put into making Google work efficiently, and that there is a staff of Google employees monitoring, and tweaking, and caring for the Google search engine. What the client also doesn’t realise is that Google (the company) has over 100 million servers around the world dedicated to indexing the internet.

Here is an interesting article from CMS Wire about Google and what it actually does: Enterprise Search and Pursuit of the Google Experience. (The included video by Google engineer Matt Cutts is also interesting)

Also of interest:

Learn how Google work: In Glory Detail

Google reveal the real technology behind their system.

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/enterprise-search-and-pursuit-of-the-google-experience-008150.php

“Enterprise Search” or “Federated Search”

I’ve just read an excellent blog about the difference between “Federated Search” and “Enterprise Search” (see link at end of post).

I always thought that I had a pretty good grasp on the difference between the two types of search, but the above mentioned blog describes it well.

In Enterprise Search, content is indexed locally. That is, the content is made available to the search engine, and the metadata, and if possible, the content itself, is indexed and stored in a database.

Federated Search, however, utilises the search results that are provided by an “external” system. (“External” refers to another document management system, or search application.)

Jeroen Mom (author of the  blog) points out a few interesting things about the different indexing methods. Because, in Enterprise Search, the documents are available by the indexer, all the metadata and content can be crawled and indexed. With a Federated Search, the results are what was returned from the external system.  This relies on the external system’s indexing capabilities.

On the other hand, to access, and index documents locally (in an Enterprise Search) usually requires loading the document to a locally accessible location. To do this can chew up a lot of bandwidth. Then there is the corresponding CPU utilization to do the actual indexing. And to keep the index up-to-date, further crawls/indexing need to be performed regularly. If the documents are relatively “close” (within the same sub-net) then this should not be too much of a problem.

However, when the documents are located in, or indexed by, remote (outside the firewall) systems, a federated search has certain benefits. All that is being transferred is the query, and the results that match that query. The indexing process is being handled by the remote system. And this includes the regular indexing required to keep the index up-to-date.

So the decision whether to use Federated Search, or Enterprise Search, depends on:

• the resources available (how much grunt does your indexing server have?),
• the availability of the content that needs to be indexed (can the indexer access the content directly)
• the bandwidth available
• the amount of confidence that the search results returned contain 100% of the content that meets the search criteria. (Are you happy with the results that the remote system provides).

(Federated search versus Enterprise search, can the one go without the other?)

Federated search versus Enterprise search, can the one go without the other?