MOSS to power Olympics portal

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server will be powering the search engine on a portal that more than thousands of people will use to access information about the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

Cool. Good win for Microsoft and MOSS.

IBM introduces eDiscovery to expand its Enterprise Content Management Solutions

Over and beyond FileNET and Content Manager On Demand, IBM just introduced its new enterprise content management software IBM eDiscovery for its clients to meet legal discovery requirements. It is intended to help organizations to proactively take control of electronically stored information across the enterprise and help reduce eDiscovery costs and improve responsiveness to litigation.

It is also expected to integrate with IBM (or FileNET's ?) records management technology.

In industries like healthcare, auto insurance, financial services, which are regulated and are subject to litigations from time to time, eDiscovery and records management are key to success and reduce the costs of litigation. IBM, which is a big player in the ECM sector, with this product, is in line with taking things a step forward in the electronic documents world.

Important day for ECM!

(1) R.H. Donnelley - the company behind Yellow Pages, drops 48% this evening. That means, they lost almost half of their company's market value in one day! That's some heavy selling!
Do you still use Yellow Pages? If you answered yes, you're probably among the last few ones to do so. People are moving more towards managing digital content, indexing and searching, and away from paper.

(2) AbitibiBowater, Inc. (ABH) - the 3rd largest pulp and paper company in North America and 8th largest in the world, also reported a Q407 loss of $250 M, with losses in both newsprint paper and specialty paper segments widening from a year before. Stock down 10%.

With more and more industries going paperless, like the news and magazines industry for example, there is more scope for ECM related products for scanning, e-faxing, ingestion, archival and retrieval of electronic documents, etc. The losses that these two big companies reported for Q407 clearly point in the direction of this trend. The Auto Insurance industry is also starting to make inroads into going paperless, if you've started receiving all your documents via email from your insurance provider.

3 Industry trends to change Web Content Management in 2008

Sitescore, the leading provider of .NET Web Content Management system, based on their research and customer experience, recently announced that three major trends are driving how enterprises are better leveraging web content management to create more compelling websites and provide better customer interaction.

(1) Integration of Web CMS into the Enterprise
(2) Growth of .NET Framework
(3) Adoption of Mobile computing

White paper summary - What Legal Wants

I read this white paper sponsored by Contoural, Inc. called, "What Legal Wants...and 7 things IT can do to meet Legal's needs". Here is the summary, in relevance to the Insurance industry and enterprise content management.

Nearly all companies in the course of regular business activities become the target of lawsuits, which vary from simple employee wrongful termination to major litigations such as class-action lawsuits. Litigations, in fact, are a reality of doing business. In the Auto Insurance industry, a huge portion of the lawsuits that the companies face comes from their Claims division, as one may expect. The explosion of electronic documents, along with new regulations, new trends in litigation discovery and how end users handle documents are forcing organizations to re-think their document retention and discovery strategies. According to a recent study from UC Berkeley, more than 96% of all information of an enterprise is in digital format and even 70% of all paper documents are copies of electronic documents.

The different kinds of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) -

I can tell in the Auto Insurance industry, we manage (scan, index, archive and retrieve) all these classes of documents which prevail as a result of the complexity of this data-driven industry.

What is Discovery?

Discovery is the process in which both parties in a lawsuit discover relevant information concerning a case. Ordered by the court during the initial phases of a lawsuit, discovery can be required both of the plaintiff and the defendant. A business that receives a discovery request that calls for the production of electronic and other documents is obligated to make a reasonable effort to search its records for responsive communications.

"Spoliation" - is the term used by courts to describe the improper destruction of evidence, including email and messages. Companies are guilty of spoliation if they destroy evidence like company records relevant to a litigation with the purpose or intent of preventing the other party from using the evidence against them. Spoliation can occur through a "conscious" decision and also unconsciously through inactivity to prevent destruction of email.

Relevant changes to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP)
The FRCP are a body of rules focussed on governing court procedures for managing civil lawsuits in United States. Here are some of the changes related to discovery that went into effect on December 1, 2006.

As it is obvious from the above summary the importance that IT plays in working with Legal to ensure smooth and reliable discovery like archiving, maintaining proper records retention strategies, and the actual electronic discovery process in the event of a lawsuit. In addition, according to Contoural, here are 7 things that IT can do to meet Legal's needs
(1) Create fast, effective litigation hold processes
(2) Educate Legal on archival capabilities of the IT organization
(3) Find and retrieve documents in native format
(4) Create and update an ESI survey data map
(5) Partner with Legal in creating the document retention policy
(6) Disable PST files and other forms of underground archival
(7) Create process for deleting older email and files that are not under hold or needed for compliance or business processes

By helping Legal with these activities, IT will move from a reactive state to a state of litigation readiness.

Gartner lists Attenex, Aungate, Dataflight, MetaLincs, Summation as some of the key vendors of E-Discovery software. EMC, IBM FileNet, HummingBird, Open Text are some of the top players in the much more complicated Records Management product which enables organizations to create the retention schedules and automate the management of their records retention policies. Since these products are very expensive and mostly have license-based costing, it depends on the companies health and IT investment strategy to go for these!

The ECM Market & major vendors

According to Gartner, ECM is a $2.9 billion market (wow! that's how big it is) in 2007, merely based on worldwide software revenues. They predict that the market size would grow at a CAGR of 12.9% through 2011. So, there's lots coming in this industry. Some vendors choose to specialize in some specific segments like Records Management or BPM and are successful niche players in those markets. Other big names like IBM (and now Microsoft - through its Sharepoint MOSS 2007 product) are trying to establish themselves as leaders in the ECM market. Below you may find Gartner's Magic Quadrant for ECM


Copyright Gartner

Gartner's hype cycle on ECM

Copyright Gartner

These are the various technologies that fall under the umbrella of ECM. Different organizations, depending on the industry, their size, their ability to invest in IT, their annual budgets, etc. implement a subset of these components.

Entering the ECM disney world...

AIIM says: Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.


Where there is data, there there is ECM. It's as broad as that. If you're working in an industry in which communication to and from the customer is key, and if you serve more than, say 10,000 customers, you're employing some ECM solution or the other without your knowledge. In almost all of the Fortune 500 companies in today's world, there must be at least one ECM vendor that helps to digitize content, store it, manage it and retrieve it.
We're no longer in a world where we can manually index, sort and search documents and photos, etc. Automation is key, and that is what ECM is all about.

ECM is a separate industry by itself, led by players like IBM FileNet, ASG, Microsoft, Adobe, etc. There are at least 20 different segments in the ECM industry, and each player competes in its own segment. Each large organization (mostly in Insurance, Healthcare, and other Financial Services, which are document-driven), employs various pieces of these ECM technologies, as per their need and investment abilities. Remember, IT is a cost-center in these industries.

More to come on the various pieces/segments of the ECM industry. Stay tuned!

Microsoft buys FAST for $1.2 B

Microsoft buys the financially/legally troubled FAST (FAst Search and Transfer - recursive acronym ?) for their Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). FAST is a Norwegian-based company founded in 1999, and is traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange. ESP includes a software framework for efficient indexing of searchable content, along with a series of search-derivative applications (SDAs) that could be used for online publishing and business intelligence.

It certainly is a good move for Microsoft. At last they realize that they are not good at search and cannot compete with the likes of Yahoo! and Google, and decide to indulge in a buyout strategy. They're paying 42% above the closing price a couple of days back when they placed the bid. The deal is expected to close in Q2 this year.

It's a pity that, they still do not even own the domain http://www.fast.com yet, as when I tried to look it up, it currently redirected to the website of another communications provider called PAETEC.

2 more sections to this blog

Hello Friends,

I'm adding 2 more sections to the blog, which I hope to be continuously updating. They would be
(1) Enterprise Content Management and (2) Auto Insurance. These are certainly two of my chief areas of interest now, as I currently manage the Progressive Content Management group. As I expand my knowledge in these areas, I hope to share them, though on a more generic basis as the section-titles indicate. Continue to read, and hope you enjoy them. Thanks,