ECM Forum Toronto

Today I spent the day at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre at the EMC Forum. It was a good day, informative, and I finally got to meet and chat with Chuck Hollis after his keynote.

During said keynote, which had a loose theme of 'the future of information management' Chuck mentioned an Economist Intelligence Unit report, sponsored by EMC; "The future of enterprise information governance" which was released today. If you click this link it will take you straight into the report PDF. You can also click here for a video of Chuck discussing the importance of information governance.

I attended an overview session on content management and archiving technologies, to see some of the Documentum 6.5 goodies, including 'My Documentum' and 'CentreStage' - but of course it was an overview, so no great detail, and even worse from my point of view, no demo machines or consultants with laptops in the 'exhibition area' so I did not get to play with CentreStage.

Admittedly this week is the big ARMA show in the U.S. and most of the EMC presence was there.

The second session was a Records Management one, with a focus on the new federated RM capabilities. This was a very intersting session, with some well grounded admissions that federated RM will never produce a 'perfect' solution from many viewpoints, but that some retention management over legacy silo's has got to be better than none at all ! You can check out EMC's Records Manager and Retention Policy Services products here.

As the final CMA track session was about document capture (i.e. scanning) I decided to check out the 'Data Loss Prevention' session. This is about using RSA products to prevent accidental loss of information from within your organisation, its not an "anti-hacking" type of security product, but it was interesting to me, but for what you might consider an odd angle. Microsoft was mentioned as a case study, as they wanted to use the DLP technology to safeguard source code, and it was mentioned that it was used to scan 30,000 file shares and 120,000 Sharepoint sites ! Please note that is note 30K 'folders' but 30K 'shares' with goodness knows how many folders in them......

Even better (?) did you immediately notice that they have 3 times more Sharepoint sites than file shares. Now that is what I call 'unchecked proliferation' :-) I will have to look up how many staff MS have on average, just to see how many Sharepoint sites per worker (or vice versa) that works out to be.

While we are talking about Sharepoint, and in reference to my previous post, the forum was much less of an unadulterated MOSS 'love in' than the last EMC World I attended (last year). The message seems to be much more that of "Sharepoint as the portal on top of our 'real' ECM system". The reasons for this being that the 'real' ECMS is better at playing nicely with Heirarchical Storage Management (HSM), single instance storage, transactional processes, RM and compliance. Possibly the qoute of the day was: "well Sharepoint done will is OK, but Sharepoint done badly is an absolute nightmare..."

Oh yeah, we hear you..!