Many of our clients are looking closely at the concept of federated records management. The fundamental principal of federated RM is that records are managed “in-place.” Essentially, organizations with a multitude of different record repositories cannot migrate content into a single “ uber ” repository; instead, they aggregate meta-data and maintain a collection of pointers back to the native content
” Simple enough, yet right now their content is scattered across five, ten, or fifteen different systems (and, unfortunately, for most of our larger clients, the number of content-related systems is much greater than fifteen). So what are the options? Consolidate all content into a single repository: This would be ideal, but often the migration costs can be overwhelming. In addition, it’s more than likely a number of applications will need to be re-written, which is also expensive. Leave the content in its current systems, but aggregate meta data: Also referred to as “federated” content management, this approach provides a virtual “view” of content via a single “parent” database, with pointers to the native resources spread across the enterprise in “child” repositories. This approach presents many appealing benefits – e.g. no need to move content – but accessing the applications will still require re-writing to query the new “parent” database
Federated Records Management . Last year I remarked that “Enterprise Content Management is dead” and made the point that organizations were just realizing that a single enterprise-class ECM implementation is just too big and takes too long to implement. The reality is that departmental solutions and multiple platforms will inevitably still store content, even if a new platform is selected as the enterprise standard. The problem is that records management becomes inconsistent because the same tools cannot be used exactly the same. More organizations and vendors are using federated approaches to centralize the records management administration against a variety of federated repositories
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