This post is meant to be a mid-year update to the issues that I have heard our clients and partners discussing in the first half of 2010:
1. Email RM – The retention and records management of email has been one of the most difficult issues for records managers to address, and many practitioners were hoping that Exchange 2010 would provide tools that make this issue easier to address. The fact that Microsoft has not provided a records management capability for email in this generation of the Office 2010 and Exchange 2010 products leaves the market open for third party solutions. On the other hand, most of our clients are still wrestling with Exchange 2007.
2. Auto-classification – Sophisticated crawling technologies, such as the EMC’s Kazeon and the StoredIQ appliances, and search tools such as Autonomy and Active Navigation, are enabling organizations to crawl through their legacy repositories and identify potential records better than they ever could before. As large organizations are replacing their legacy share drive farms through migration to better managed repositories, these tools are reducing the classification burden involved with the migration. In many cases, these tools were initially implemented as part of an eDiscovery effort, but have found additional usage in support of file intelligence and the auto-classification of records.
3. Federated Records Management – Autonomy, IBM, EMC and Open Text have been leading proponents of federated RM this year. I have not seen federated RM gain traction in the organizations where we are active, but I hear Autonomy talking about it everywhere.
4. SharePoint 2010 RM – SharePoint 2010 has finally been released, and organizations large and small are experimenting with the newly delivered RM functionality. While it contains many improvements and is architecturally much more complete than MOSS 2007 Records Management, there are still critical limitations. Some of these are structural and some are issues of the sort that any new product will contain. The first applications that receive DoD 5015 certification for SharePoint 2010 will be the traditional RM products from vendors such as Open Text, EMC, CA (Autonomy), HP and LaserFiche. All of these applications use an external repository to retain and manage records. But it is clear that there is a market for SharePoint-pure records management.
5. Physical Records Management –I have seen several new physical records management products in 2010. FileTrail burst onto the scene (for me, they indicate that they have been successful for years!) with a physical records management product that supports RFID and is well integrated to the SharePoint Term Store. Ocean Road Software indicates that they do it all, and like many of the best records management companies, they are Canadian. I have not seen much growth overall in physical records management market in the first half of 2010 as organizations wrestled with new technology platforms and the economy.
6. External Blob Storage (EBS) – Other new products, such as the HP Tower 7 and the EMC EDRSMS Connectors, use External Blob Storage to enable the records management capabilities of proven enterprise management products to be combined with SharePoint. These products take very different approaches to both integration and records management. HP maps attributes between a SharePoint site and an HP Tower repository of record, while the EMC EDRSMS connector sends the entire SharePoint property bag and the associated SharePoint objects to Documentum for records management in Retention Policy Services (RPS) folders.
7. The Trifecta – The core problem that is crying out for a solution is not the conversion of legacy content management systems, the integration of physical records management systems, or the migration of websites to either Open Source or SharePoint which are the problems that many ECM and RM vendors are focused on. The core problem that I see organizations of all sizes searching for in records management is a solution that will apply retention and records management classification consistently and unobtrusively to content in SharePoint, share drives and email. This is much more important than converting legacy content management systems or legacy website tools, because many organizations still have 80-90% of their content in these platforms. Opportunity knocks.
Let’s hope business continues to grow in the second half of 2010.
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