ECM systems

Digitech Systems, a provider of on-demand ECM, recently announced that they have significantly pumped up their PaperVision Capture. PaperVision Capture allows businesses to design processes for capturing paper documents and converting them to an electronic format. Users can index them for secure storage, management and retrieval within an ECM system. The fresh squeezed features include OCR processing, which automatically processes image files, including paper documents converted to electronic format from a scanner or MFP, into searchable indexed files.

Alfresco Software, the leader in open source enterprise content management (ECM), recently announced the expansion of its North and South American partner program for system integrators (SI) in response to increasing demand. As open source economics continue to create new opportunities for SIs, the lack of upfront license fees for Alfresco ECM also enables enterprise customers to fund more projects and allocate more budget and resources to project delivery.

Alfresco has just announced the third incarnation of its Enterprise Content Management System. Alfresco Enterprise 3 is what Alfresco CTO John Newton refers to as the completion of the Product Suite that had been envisioned since the company began. A Busy Year for Alfresco These days the team over that Alfresco has been very busy. They have managed to weave their ECM into a number of other products. Products like Quark, Acrobat.com, CAStor and Adobe LiveCycle are just a few to mention who have incorporated the ECM into their product in some way.

One of the words that makes me most cringe when I hear or see it in vendor marketing is the word scalable.  It's no less annoying when buyers ask us "is EMC/FileNet/Hyland/Nuxeo/HP/Etc. scalable?" Here's why.....ECM systems can be scalable or they can fail to scale well. They can have modular architectures that allow you to simply add more elements as required, rather than multiply the entire system as things expand. They can be scalable in that they have built in high availability, automatic failover support, run on enterprise grade application servers and databases. They can be scalable because they have been tested and proven to handle very high volumes (hundreds of millions of documents) in the repository and/or tested and proven to handle very high throughput rates (tens of thousands per hour or minute). There are many ways in which an ECM system can scale or not. But the biggest element determining whether the system can scale is your usage of it.

Survey results announced at the Info Ireland Online event by AIIM Europe indicate that 58% of Irish respondents are considering using MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Services) for document and records management within the next two years, but only 19% have a formal plan outlining how and where it will be applied. The survey also found that 23% of Irish organisations plan to migrate their content into a single centralised ECM (Enterprise Content Management) system whereas 42% plan to leave existing multiple repositories in place and provide a single-sign-on portal to link them together. Of these, more than half plan to use SharePoint as the linking mechanism. Enterprise search is being considered by 7% of organisations as a suitable way of linking repositories for ease of user access.

Microsoft has collaborated with EMC, IBM and other leading software vendors to create the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. The jointly developed specification is designed to simplify interoperability with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems by leveraging existing open standards including SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), REST (Representational State Transfer) and Atom. To achieve the goal of interoperability between ECM systems and to facilitate the development of content centric applications, the following criteria were guiding principles for the development of the CMIS specification:

EMC Corp., IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. recently announced a jointly developed specification that uses Web Services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable applications to interoperate with multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories by different vendors. The companies intend to submit the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for advancement through its rigorous standards development process. The ultimate goal of CMIS is to dramatically reduce the IT burden around multivendor, multirepository content management environments. Currently, customers must spend valuable time and money to create and maintain custom integration code and one-off integrations to get different ECM systems within their organizations to "talk" to one another. The specification will also benefit independent software vendors (ISVs) by enabling them to create specialized applications that are capable of running over a variety of content management systems.

According to a comprehensive survey of banks and credit unions conducted by Cornerstone Advisors, Inc., the first quarter of 2008 shows that credit unions have embraced ECM more fully than banks. Of those institutions surveyed, 77 percent of credit unions responded that they had implemented an ECM solution, as compared to 55 percent of banks. Although success stories and mature vendor offerings are prevalent within the industry, many financial institutions have either yet to adopt an ECM system or have not utilized their system to its fullest potential. According to Cornerstone Advisors' findings, "When asked to rate ‘the level of adoption, acceptance, utilization, integration and mastery' of installed ECM solutions, on a scale of 1 to 5, banks responded with an average score of 3.5 and credit unions 3.7."

In order to continue their endeavor to offer the best service to customers and gain a competitive edge over their competition, Programmer's Investment Corporation (PIC) decided to implement an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. This would allow them to improve productivity while reducing costs. Submitted by Integrated Document Technologies, Inc.

Traditionally enterprise content management (ECM) systems help organize and maintain office information for large corporations. However, for non-enterprise size companies like small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), organization of information is a challenge that affects everything from productivity to cluttered filing cabinets and desks to loss of profits. Submitted by FileVision

To establish greater efficiencies and allow for collaborative data sharing, reporting, and tracking, many businesses are taking advantage of enterprise content management (ECM) systems as part of their infrastructures. So, how do you choose which products are right for yourcompany's needs, and how do you combine them into an easy-to use system?

Sharp HealthCare, a $1.1 billion regional healthcare system, has increased productivity, supported disaster recovery strategies, and improved service by implementing an enterprise content management solution for HMO claims, contracts, and invoices. Soon these benefits will be extended to admitting and patient accounting. Submitted by Hyland Software

By implementing an ECM system, a city government can provide constituents with instant access topublic records that once took two to three weeks to retrieve. Used with permission from Integrated Solutions magazine

How much time does your staff spend sorting your company's incoming documents? While sorting is a necessary task, it often creates a bottleneck in productivity that delays the entry of critical data from these documents into your database, ECM, or ERP system. You need a powerful, automated solution — you need AnyDoc®CLASSIFY, powered by AnyDoc's latest technology called Apptivity™.

ING Canada needed to upgrade its document management system to support a growing number of retained documents and accommodate future expansion.Replace aging microfilm system with a scanning solution that supports ING Canada's new Enterprise Content Management system and corporate information security strategies. Submitted by Eastman Kodak

Document collaboration is something companies do every day, albeit not in the most effective ways. Think of the documents you've passed to and received from members of your team and other departments, or e-mails you've sent to and received from colleagues in other locations, asking for feedback. These methods provide you with the input you need, but not in an organized, cohesive manner. Document collaboration systems, as part of an ECM system, can provide this cohesion for you. Used with permission from Integrated Solutions magazine