AIIM Knowledge Center Blog

Capabilities/functions not provided by Microsoft SharePoint?

I was just reminded of the Microsoft whitepaper “Enterprise Content Management - Breaking the Barriers to Broad User Adoption” from July 2006 that lists capabilities/functions NOT provided by SharePoint (almost on the last page);

• "Imaging – including batch and high-volume scanning, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR).
• Taxonomy management – tools for managing enterprisewide metadata.
• Archiving – for long-term storage and e-mail journaling.
• Content integration – the ability to search third-party content repositories and move items to/from Office SharePoint Server 2007 and third-party repositories.
• Digital Asset Management – including management of large digital assets such as digital videos, very large digital images, and other large digital objects.
• Vertical and compliance-specific business solutions – vertical solutions for key markets such as Finance, Legal and Professional Services, Government, and Utilities; compliance solutions for Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and others."

Do you find this correct? Remember that SharePoint is now DoD5015.2 approved.

By Atle Skjekkeland.

Information Rights Management (IRM)

During the AIIM’s ERM course, I talk about Digital Rights Management (DRM).  I recently was asked about IRM, and you may find what I found interesting.

The purpose of IRM and its limitations:

Information Rights Management (IRM) allows individuals and administrators to specify access permissions to documents, workbooks, and presentations.  This helps prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people.  After permission for the file has be restricted by using IRM, the access and usage restrictions are enforced no matter where the information is, because the permission to a file is stored in the document file itself.

IRM helps individuals enforce their personal preferences concerning the transmission of personal or private information.  IRM also helps organizations enforce corporate policy governing the control and dissemination of confidential or proprietary information.

IRM helps to do the following:

• Prevent an authorized recipient of restricted content from forwarding, copying, modifying, printing, faxing, or pasting the content for unauthorized use.
• Prevent restricted content from being copied by using the Print Screen feature in Microsoft Windows.
• Restrict content wherever it is sent.
• Support file expiration so that content in documents can n longer be viewed after a specified period of time.
• Enforce corporate policies that govern the use and dissemination of content within the company.

IRM can’t prevent the following:

• Content from being erased, stolen, or captured and transmitted by malicious programs such as Trojan horses, keystroke loggers, and certain types of spy ware.
• Content from being lost, or corrupted, because of the actions of computer viruses.
  Restricted content from being hand-copied, or retyped, from a display on a recipient’s screen.
• A recipient from taking a digital photograph of the restricted content displayed on a screen.
• Restricted content from being copied by using third-party screen-capture programs.

The about information was taken from: Information Rights Management in the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Applies to: Microsoft Office Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Word 2007.

By Carl E.Weise

Autoclassification: Misconceptions and Benefits

We are hearing more and more these days about auto-classification in relation to Electronic Records Management (ERM). A growing number of people in the user community feel this is the answer to building a classifications scheme that will address their compliance and discovery issues. The answer to this is not by itself and the real question should be whether or not it can help.

First we must recognize that this technology is very capable of managing the classification of information and in fact helps ease the effort and dependency placed on users to manually declare and store records. We must also accept that they do require and typically are based upon rules engines to perform this function. Thus, we still need to make the intellectual effort of creating a Business Classification Scheme (BCS) that meets our needs and ensure that it is not too granular or complex in nature.

Once we have established the BCS and are sure that it meets our requirements, we can then incorporate the use of auto-classification technology to enhance the capture and classification process for email and a variety of standardized document types like claim forms, invoices, and loan applications. In these cases, auto-classification will recognize, classify and store these document types in the appropriate levels without user intervention.

What we must consider carefully is how we want to use this technology, to what level and toward what aspect of our business. Things to consider when investigating auto-classification include:

• Levels of accuracy delivered versus what you require
• Position auto-classification to automate your existing processes
• Develop and implement a BCS prior to using auto-classification
• Evaluate technology using a Proof of Concept approach using your real data, BCS and taxonomies

Auto-classification is not the total solution to classifying information but it is a great enhancement in the automation of your processes, providing a greater level of confidence and consistency in your practices. This definitely is a technology to consider as part of your overall automation program. The key is to remember, like in any project, to do the upfront planning and configuration properly in order to succeed.

Happy Holidays to all.

Bob Larrivee - AIIM

What is a good definition of ECM?

Gartner sees ECM as an umbrella term for the following core components; Imaging, Document Management, Electronic Records Management, Web Content Management, Workflow, and Document Centric Collaboration. But ECM is not only about technologies, and AIIM defines ECM as the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, store, manage, preserve and deliver information in support of business processes. We developed a few years ago a roadmap to explain ECM in more detail, which is also the foundation of our ECM Practitioner training course.

I also like Russel Stalters’ BetterECM definition of ECM: “ECM is a management practice that provides for governance of an information management environment toward the goal of improving compliance, information reuse and sharing, and operational performance. ECM is a structured approach employing methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools to manage the lifecycle of information and to continuously optimize an organization’s collections of information and information management processes.”

My colleague Carl Frappaolo from AIIM Market Intelligence developed to the following model to explain ECM:

 

I like this one model since it expands the definition of ECM to include other content related technologies, but also addresses the need for security vs. collaboration and innovation.

What is your definition of ECM? Let me know.

By Atle Skjekkeland.

What is really Enterprise 2.0?

Enterprise 2.0 social networking capabilities can help organizations capture unstructured tacit knowledge to improve knowledge management and collaboration across the enterprise. Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School, defines Enterprise 2.0 as the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

• Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities.
• Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.
• Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.
• Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following;
  • Optional
  • Free of up-front workflow
  • Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
  • Accepting of many types of data

Social software for an enterprise must according to McAfee have the following functionality to work well:

• Search: allow users to search for other users or content
• Links: group similar users or content together
• Authoring: include blogs and wikis
• Tags: allow users to tag content
• Extensions: recommendations of users or content based on profile
• Signals: allow people to subscribe to users or content with RSS feeds

He recommends that the software must be easy to use and not impose any rigid structure for users. The roll-out should be informal, but on a common platform to enable future collaboration between areas. He also recommends strong and visible managerial support to achieve this.

Is this the next big thing for organizations? Please let me know your view on this.

By Atle Skjekkeland.

How does Enterprise Search really work?

Here’s an illustration from CMS Watch that we use in the new AIIM Information Organization & Access (IOA) Certificate program that shows the different search subsystems and how they work together.

First is content indexing, which is created by crawling directories and websites and extracting content from databases and other repositories. This has to be done on a regular basis, so if one of those repositories is updated the search engine will have some sort of procedure that enables it to go in and source and index that updated content.

So once it gathers all that content, as I mentioned, it creates an index. That is a searchable index of all the content. And oftentimes, there’s other value added processing, such as metadata extraction, and also auto-summarization. What exactly does that mean?

Well, many search tools will actually take the collection and group documents together into some sort of category. That in turn could be searched on a user could get the results based on how the particular search engine has categorized it. So once this index exists, there can be the acceptance of queries. So a searcher will then type in some sort of query as to what they’re looking for. And query is essentially not necessarily in question form; it’s just a term or whatever you’re looking for, typed into the search box.

And then there’s an engine that processes this query. The query passes over the index, finds the documents that match that particular term or subject, and then it returns those documents and it goes through some sort of processor. The processor will sort the documents by various items, so, relevance or it will cluster the documents based on the categorization, or some other logic. If you have best bets or recommended best content, whatever it might be. That’s really up to you how you want to process them once that query returns the content.

Then of course lastly, we have the formatting. And that’s the results page that you’re used to seeing. It formats the results, usually in some sort of template. And there, you also have a lot of flexibility as to how you’d like to see it presented. Now, every single step along this process, all of these subsystems can be tweaked to accommodate your particular information organization and access needs. The part at the top around content indexing, that’s where you’re going to be particularly occupied with your information organization. And how your content is organized is going to effect how well the search tool can go through the collection and create that index.

The second part is customizing your access experience, if you wish to do so. The search tool will allow you to specify what kinds of queries you want to accept, what kinds of documents you want to return based on those queries, and then you have lots of options as to how you want them processed and how you want them presented.

The new AIIM IOA training programs covers how to optimize Enterprise Search, and I recommend you to sign up for this program if you have, or plan to, invest in Enterprise Search technologies. For more information visit www.aiim.org/training

By Atle Skjekkeland.

Using RSS 'feeds' to be notified about new information on blogs and websites

Many members subscribe to this blog using email and I will therefore try to explain how you can use RSS 'feeds' as an alternative to email notifications.

RSS is a transformation technology that delivers a list of new or updated content to recipients, through a variety of channels (for example to computers, portable digital assistants, web-capable mobile phones, etc.).  Note that no attempt is made to send substantial content – only the fact that it is available, in the hope and expectation that many recipients will then visit your web site to see the full content (and while there, perhaps buy something).  Not surprisingly, news items, sports results and financial market updates are popular RSS ‘feeds’ which attract recipient’s interest.  Many organisations, large and small, are implementing RSS feeds from their content – well known examples include the BBC, CNN, and NASA to name but three. You need a reader that supports RSS feeds to subscribe to information and I have in this previous post described how you can set this up from this blog. Microsoft Explorer 7 now supports RSS feeds, and you access this via your Favorites Center.

The advantage of the RSS approach for content providers is that users are reminded to visit a site quite often, and are not relying on users to remember to visit your site occasionally, to “see what’s new”.  Their interest is (hopefully) aroused by the RSS information which is being frequently pushed to them.

Wikis for Free-form Collaboration

A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content or files. It also allows for linking among any number of pages, and this ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for Free-form Collaboration.

I have the last week been playing with different wikis and below are some thoughts;

EditMe is a very easy to use wiki. It has an in-browser WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that allows simple editing of every page. It's a lot like using a familiar Word Processing application with editing features, and it allows you to publish and edit text or upload files with version control, but also add comments below the text or uploaded files.

MediaWiki is a wiki preferred by some of our more technical members. It is not that easy to use as EditMe, but it does not take you long to learn how to publish and edit text or upload files. MediaWiki has by default a start page followed by a discussion page for each topic, and you can also create watch lists to monitor changes. It is very flexible and easy to navigate, and this is the wiki software used by Wikipedia.

SocialText is another leading wiki for organizations. All users have their own dashboard with access to new and existing information in the wiki. It has a WYSIWYG editor with version control and allows you to email pages in and out of the wiki. It also allows you to only see changes in the wiki.

What is your preferred wiki? Please let me know the pros and cons.

Free-form Collaboration: Blogs, Wikis, Web conferencing, and Social networking software

The online version of AIIM E-DOC Magazine has two interesting articles explaining the pros and cons of Free-form Collaboration. This type of software allows people to exchange ideas and information with co-workers, business partners, and customers in a dynamic, open-ended manner. Anyone taking part in the collaboration can post information and respond to what has already been posted. The most common tools are blogs, wikis, Web conferencing, and social networking software.

The article “Free-form Collaboration” by Bob Violino gives you the following examples of Free-form Collaboration;

• Socialtext WorkSpace from Socialtext provides wiki collaboration; team blog publishing; integration with email and instant messaging; advanced search, tagging and organization; and personalized and customizable navigation. It has features for access control and wiki administration, and security, according to Socialtext.
• WebEx Meeting Center from WebEx integrates data, voice, and video within a standard Web browser, enabling organizations to hold meetings over the Internet from virtually anywhere. Users can show PowerPoint presentations, Flash animations, and streaming audio and video, and view and edit documents in real time.
• BEA markets Project Builder, enterprise productivity software that's designed to allow users to quickly create collaborative applications for business problems that usually involve a high degree of ad hoc activities between teams. Users of the software can create applications via a library of page components that connect directly to enterprise data, defining richer and more usable views on that data within new Web applications, according to BEA. The product supports multiple participants.

And the article “Something Wiki This Way Comes” by Jesse Wilkins address the pros and cons of wikis in more detail.

Barcodes - how NOT to use it!

Barcodes fill vital roles in capturing, indexing, tracking, integrating, and document storage-and-retrieval. Similarly, they are invaluable when integrating Web content with information that originated on paper. For an introduction about Barcodes check out this AIIM E-DOC Magazine article by Gordon E.J. Hoke from eVisory.

             "Atle Skjekkeland" as a Code 128 barcode

Remember to think process from start to finish when planning your capture process. And press this link for one of my favorite commercials how NOT to implement Barcodes.