AIIM Knowledge Center Blog

Nearly 75% of organizations will invest in document management in 2008?

Forrester just asked 1,017 software decision-makers from North American and European enterprise companies about their ECM plans, and the results are overwhelming;

• Nearly 75% of orgs will invest in document management in 2008
• Nearly 65% of orgs will invest in team collaboration software in 2008
• Microsoft leads all vendors by a large margin with nearly 25% of organizations planning to invest in its technology for ECM
• Rather than disrupting the existing ECM vendor landscape, which remains healthy, Microsoft is establishing foundation content services as a new class of ECM functionality

Press here to access a presentation summarizing their findings. Do you trust these numbers? Let me know...

By Atle Skjekkeland.

New Forrester Wave for Message Archiving Software, Q1 2008

Forrester released a few days ago their latest Forrester Wave for message archiving software, and they report that organizations are implementing these solutions to reduce their storage costs, improved mailbox management with easy access to messages, and lower cost of eDiscovery. You have a lot of choices for choosing your message archiving software; pure plays like ZANTAZ, Mimosa Systems and ZipLip; ECM suite providers like EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet and OpenText; storage management and search vendors such as CA, EMC, HP and IBM. Vendors like Symantec also provide message archiving solutions in combination with other products, and vendors like Autonomy ZANTAZ offer message archiving solutions integrated with their enterprise search and text analytics offering. The report is available for free courtesy of ZANTAZ.

And remember to check out AIIM’s new Email Management training program before implementing any of these solutions. The training program is designed from global best practices among AIIM's 50,000 members, and it covers best practices and technologies for:

• Email capture and retention
• Technologies for email management
• Email storage, archiving and backup
• Email classification
• Developing, implementing, and managing the email policy
• Governance

By Atle Skjekkeland.

New Gartner Magic Quadrant for BPMS

I just found out from the Column 2 blog by Sandy Kemsley that Gartner published earlier this month their latest Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites (BPMS). A BPMS must according to Gartner support all the following process management capabilities:

• Modeling and analysis of business process to identify the best possible design
• "Round trip" behavior between the model and its physical implementation
• Coordination of multiple interaction patterns among users participating in the process
• Providing participants with access to various forms of business content for manipulation and management within the process
• User manipulation and management of business rules
• User and group collaboration in the process context
• Monitoring, reporting, analysis and notification of work activities and business events
• Process simulation and optimization using real-time, historical and estimated data values
• Management of all process components through their life cycles

You can access the report for free courtesy of Pegasystems. And I strongly recommend any project team tasked with improving business processes to first sign-up for AIIM's BPM Certificate Program that covers the above issues.

By Atle Skjekkeland.

New Forrester Wave for ECM Q4, 2007

Forrester released last month their latest evaluation of ECM suites, and they claim that industry professionals that drive ECM evaluations want five key items from their ECM suites:

• A single vendor that provides ECM tool breadth.
• An ECM platform they can build an IT skill set around.
• A low-cost way to make content management available to everyone.
• One place to go to mitigate content-related risks.
• A way to put content into context for people.

And how are the ECM vendors supporting this? Below is an extract from the report:

Forrester evaluated 11 vendors across approximately 60 criteria and found that IBM, EMC, and Oracle lead thanks to suite breadth and a focus on enterprise information management needs. Open Text leads all pure plays with a strong core suite of ECM tools. Interwoven, Hyland, and Vignette, all Strong Performers, focus more attention on supporting content-centric applications than providing an ECM platform. Microsoft, another Strong Performer, misses some important features, but it has a bright future in ECM. Finally, Contenders SAP, Xerox, and Alfresco Software lack breadth and depth but show promise in ECM as alternatives to ECM’s four horsemen: EMC, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.

You can access the report for free courtesy of Oracle.

By Atle Skjekkeland.

Two new Forrester Wave reports available for BPM

Forrester has the last months released two new Forrester Wave reports evaluating BPM products focused on document intensive and human centric processes.

• Forrester Wave™: Business Process Management. For Document Processes, Q3 2007
• The Forrester Wave™: Human-Centric BPM For Java Platforms, Q3 2007

By Atle Skjekkeland.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Active Archiving 2007

Gartner released earlier this year a Magic Quadrant for Email Active Archiving. Vendors included in this report must provide products that support the following;

• Provide a searchable archive of all e-mail messages for a defined period of time
• Be used independently or as part of a corporate records repository for legal and business uses
• Be used as a solution to reduce the size of production email data stores to gain operational efficiencies (reduce backup time, improve recovery and eliminate the need for quotas while still keeping the active data store lean).

You may access this report courtesy of Symantec.

By Atle Skjekkeland.

New Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM, 2007

Gartner published last week their new Magic Quadrant for ECM, and you can access this report for free courtesy of OpenText. Gartner sees ECM as an "umbrella"-term that encompasses the following core components:

• Document Management
• Document Imaging
• Electronic Records Management
• Workflow
• Web Content Management
• Document-Centric Collaboration

According to Gartner, the ECM market is worth approximately $2.9 billion in 2007 in worldwide software revenue, and they expect a compound annual growth rate of 12.9% through 2011. This is a healthy market, but it is also one that is undergoing transformation. Content technologies are steadily gaining more capabilities to handle some aspects of structured data as well as unstructured data, and Gartner's vision for the evolutionary path of these technologies is called enterprise information management (EIM).

By Atle Skjekkeland.

New Gartner Magic Quadrant for Information Access

I just received the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Information Access 2007 courtesy of Fast, and you can download a copy of the report from their website. The quadrant includes several new players, but also a lot of changes.

Search is not just search anymore, and Gartner has in recent years been using the term “Information access technology” to include and expand on what they previously called "enterprise search technology”. They use the term information access to include a collection of technologies to help you organize and find information, such as;

• enterprise search;
• content classification, categorization and clustering;
• fact and entity extraction;
• taxonomy creation and management;
• information presentation (for example visualization).

AIIM prefer to use the term "Information Organization & Access" (IOA) instead of just Information Access since many of the above technologies help you organize information for better access. You can learn more about this in our new IOA training program.

By Atle Skjekkeland.

Web Conferencing

Gartner estimates that Web conferencing was a $935 million market in 2006, growing at 19.5% compound annual growth rate through 2010. The following functionality should minimum be supported by a Web Conferencing product:

• Presentation delivery
• Desktop or application sharing
• Text chat
• Shared whiteboard
• Basic security

You can access Gartner’s 2007 Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing 2007 courtesy of Adobe.

By Atle Skjekkeland.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Active-Archiving products

Gartner introduced last month a new Magic Quadrant for Email Active-Archiving products. These products should according to Gartner provide you with the following functionality:

• Capture and archive all email messages entering and leaving staff as unique indexed records
• Provide access to the archive via web client and email client
• Provide audit trail and secure storage
• Support multi tier storage strategy
• Offer personal data storage migration tools and temporary offline local storage options to eliminate the storage of email messages outside the control of the archive system
• Provide or integrate with a solid Electronic Records Management solution to manage the lifecycle of records including proper retention and destruction.

Gartner estimates that the worldwide email archiving market was $207 million in new software in 2006, an increase of 42.8% over 2005. The market is expected to grow to $1.0 billion by 2011. You can access the report courtesy of Symantec.

By Atle Skjekkeland.