Another ARMA International has come and gone with huge success! The Open Text booth saw three times the traffic of last year and we were able to connect with close to 1,100 attendees. We heard a lot of buzz around email management, eDiscovery, and the management of SharePoint content. There was also a low rumbling around the concept of Web 2.0 and the effects for records management.

During the conference we introduced an expansion of our content lifecycle management (CLM) services for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, extending the solution to our eDOCS customers. CLM Services for SharePoint, eDOCS Edition by SeeUnity will provide eDOCS customers integrated records management and archiving capabilities to improve compliance initiatives in a market where growing regulatory demands and risk management are major concerns.

This year we also offered the "spin to win" activity where visitors were given the chance to spin the wheel to win a prize. It was lined up each day and drew great attention to the booth.

Our speaker at the event was EVP of Marketing Bill Forquer. Bill spoke with a number of industry analysts, press, fellow industry colleagues and practitioners. Here are some observations and threads of his conversations...

• Re-evaluations of business strategy and corresponding IT priorities triggered by economic uncertainty
• Information governance is moving up the priority list; it is the foundation for lots of benefits
• Increased blurring of records and eDiscovery processes; they are becoming more closely aligned
• Increased attention on retention and disposition, and not just with formal records programs
• Federated vs. centralized records strategies. The aspiration for federated is there; the legacy of centralized remains.
• "We don't have retention problems, we have disposition problems. We retain just fine."

This year's conference really adapted well to the Las Vegas theme. Each day we got to experience records mangers and information professionals doing either karaoke, dancing with the stars, or playing Guitar Hero. You could not walk through the exhibit hall without witnessing either Elvis or a Las Vegas show girl. Lots of fun was had, there was much to learn and many great conversations were shared. My hats are tipped to the organizers and we look forward to returning next year.

eDiscovery has been top of mind for organizations in multiple industries in the United States - spoliation, smoking guns, litigation, court fines and sanctions; eDiscovery costs, as well as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure amendments which stipulate that organizations must have defensible policies and practices in place for the management of electronically-stored information. On top of this, many organizations face numerous compliance regulations that require certain documents and emails to be retained for a specific retention periods.

Energy organizations are far from exempt from eDiscovery issues. In fact, research from Fulbright & Jaworski LLP on litigation trends found that Energy was the only industry in which more than half of the companies surveyed had regulatory proceedings initiated or filed against them in the past year. To make it more meaningful, Energy companies are operating in turbulent times as it relates to pricing, costs, geopolitical risk, etc. and they frequently engage in aggressive and risky exploration/capital project investments.

So what to do? Well first, you can listen to a podcast we recorded that features Rebecca Ptaszynski, an associate in the Commercial Litigation Group at Vedder Price, as well as Stephen Ludlow, program manager, eDiscovery for Open Text, and Hugh Ritchie, program manager for manufacturing and energy at Open Text. They provide some great information to get energy companies thinking about eDiscovery.

In the podcast, Stephen talks about some key things energy organizations need to do to be prepared for eDiscovery requests. They're outlined below:

1. Conduct a thorough risk assessment on your litigation readiness. Review your policies and capabilities for both information disposition and for the capability of putting content on litigation hold. Assess your records environment - what you have in place, what you are lacking, and the risks and vulnerabilities found within your records management procedures. If you were faced with litigation tomorrow, determine what risks you would face and what potential problems you would have in producing the information that is requested. Determine how ready your company is from a policy perspective to be able to respond promptly to litigation.

2. Develop an internal team of eDiscovery specialists. This team of specialists will help to ensure you have the capability of being able to respond to eDiscovery from an IT perspective, and from a legal perspective. Specialists will work with the content being collected and put on preservation hold, and help you understand the content, search through the content and eventually make the content available for legal review. Having a specialist in house provides the capability to reduce the amount of content that is handed over for legal review. They also help to ensure that the searches and the collection of content are done defensibly should you be challenged.

3. Look at each case separately. Organizations need to look at every case separately to determine how they will respond internally from an eDiscovery perspective. A risk assessment should be conducted on every case and determine if your current procedures are relevant. Keeping it in-house makes sense, but there are some cases where it is still a good idea to get a specialist in to do the eDiscovery work.

4. Implement an Enterprise Content Management Strategy. An Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system, containing solid records management policies, helps energy organizations understand the content they have within their organization. It allows them to put disposition policies on their information to get the sheer amount of information growing in their organization under control. An ECM system also enables organizations to broadly implement litigation holds on content so that when they are subject to litigation, they have the capabilities to put the content on hold and ensure that content does not get disposed of inadvertently during the case or prior to the case.

This week, Open Text will be at the ARMA International's 53rd Annual Conference and Expo in Las Vegas. "This world-renown event is where professionals go for real business solutions, best practices, technology tools and innovative ideas".

I look forward to having the opportunity to speak to records managers and information management professionals about their take on "everything 2.0". What are their thoughts on digital content preservation, how do we manage content that is either user generated or heavily socialized? Are these questions keeping them up at night?

With the digitization of our information I am starting to wonder; what content will be left behind as artifacts for the next generations? Is it safe to assume that content that we deem as important will be reproducible in 20 years time?

Digital content - unlike paper - cannot be stored safely away for others to view in years to come, or can it? Digital content is more complex in nature, as we are talking about 'content in action'. Also, we are no longer creating content as a 'party of one', we are socializing our content. We are creating our content using tools such as wikis, blogs and chat instances.

In my humble opinion, if we are doing this in an enterprise arena, than it should be constituted as a record. There is no question that the long standing and revered requirement to preserve and manage records is continuing to grow in magnitude as information becomes more pervasive and yet more fluid in the digital age. The question becomes how do we retain the contextual premise of the content? How do we classify it? These amongst many other are questions that I will save for the professionals to answer next week.

We'll be providing regular updates here @ ECM Briefs including the buzz from the show floor. Or follow my real-time updates on Twitter here, using the hashtag #ARMA2008. If you are attending the show, stop by booth #711 and say hello. We are there October 20th though to the 23rd.

News south (err... north) of the border this week as controversy erupts over the email of a current state governor and vice-presidential nominee. This issue first hit the radar with the apparent hacking and inappropriate distribution of email sent through a free hosted service but has now resurfaced as the focal point of a debate over transparency, email records and appropriate use of communication forms that could be subject to Open Records legislation. Alaska's Open Records Act defines public records very much like any North American jurisdiction with Access to Information or Freedom of Information "sunshine" laws:

books, papers, files, accounts, writings, including drafts and memorializations of conversations, and other items, regardless of format or physical characteristics, that are developed or received by a public agency, or by a private contractor for a public agency, and that are preserved for their informational value or as evidence of the organization or operation of the public agency

While this particular incident is receiving front-page attention because of the impending U.S. election, it most surely is not an isolated incident or one restricted to public sector. Enterprise Content Management and Records Management professionals have, since 2001, been working to develop awareness, solutions and information governance strategies to meet rigorous disclosure, records retention and electronic discovery requirements in the U.S. and increasingly in Canada.

The Alaskan email controversy serves as a wake up call to information management practitioners regardless of the jurisdiction or department we serve - public business communication must be preserved, protected and disclosed regardless of the individual format, program or communication channel that is used.

Back to basics - manage the content, not the container it came in. Use of unsanctioned email, text, chat or other electronic communication tools does not preclude the record from inclusion in an ATIP/FOI or discovery order in most jurisdictions. Unmanaged, uncontrolled business correspondence is a time bomb in government and commercial enterprise.

Transparency is as crucial a component of compliance as is a retention schedule.

What does the current financial crisis in the global markets mean for organizations when it comes to ECM? According to Open Text's Director of Collaborative Content Management, Cheryl McKinnon, it will likely add fuel to the trend toward better information governance, something that got its start in the wake of Enron.

In a press release issued by Open Text today, McKinnon points out that better information governance can help organizations maintain stakeholder trust, improve transparency and uncover new opportunities for cost reductions. Many organizations are in a better position today than a few years ago because they are continuing to build on the work they've done since Enron.

McKinnon said, "For large companies, information governance is a major challenge, given the complexity of information systems across many departments, plus a store of electronic content that grows daily. Companies in many industries have made progress over the last few years to tap into this mountain of information to improve controls. But there's still more to do in corporations and government to establish comprehensive governance strategies, particularly with today's increasingly global, distributed work environment."

The potential for new regulations in the U.S. and other countries in the wake of the Wall Street crisis is another driver of renewed information governance efforts: "An information governance strategy prepares your organization to meet new regulatory rules sooner, because processes and controls are already in place: there is full transparency into how information flows through the organization," said McKinnon.

Besides meeting regulatory and legal rules, information governance provides other benefits which can come in handy during a slower economy. McKinnon points to being able to reduce costs and improve processes in transaction-oriented systems such as accounts payable. Companies can also establish a corporate memory that captures information from worker collaboration so that best practices can be preserved for future projects. This can be critical if disruptive forces in the economy cause workers to shift jobs, leave the organization or face merger and acquisition upheavals.

The key requirement for success, according to McKinnon is to establish information governance as an enterprise-wide initiative, rather than limited to specific departments: "You may decide to address information governance requirements in stages over time, but your strategy should be based on a review of people, processes and content across the organization. Companies that take this approach often expose potential legal or regulatory risks and can act to minimize the threat."

Open Text hosted its annual Canadian Public Sector Days in Gatineau, Quebec September 16-17, 2008, and were pleased to host 600 registrants from not only the Canadian Federal government, but provinces, cities and regional governments as well. University of Waterloo Dean of Arts - Dr. Ken Coates - provided an inspirational and thought-provoking keynote on Tuesday morning, challenging public sector professionals to take up the task to help propel Canada into a leadership position internationally by accelerating our Digital Depth and becoming and information-rich nation.

One of the sessions I delivered has been an area of interest and research for the last year - Information Governance. Inspired by some of the research from www.gartner.com over the last two years, Information Governance challenges information management professionals to think beyond compliance and retention pressures when considering an information management strategy. According to researchers Debra Logan, Toby Bell and Ted Friedman, Information Governance is a "strategic business discipline that better controls data via valuation, policies and process". It "requires cross-disciplinary business and IT strategy ... that better relate people, policies, processes and technology to the information needs of business leadership." (1)

We know that there are emerging challenges to public sector: demographic shifts due to the retirement wave that is pending, the disruptions to content and processes when reorganizations, mergers/spinoffs or elections occur, the rise of the 2.0 culture and the cultural and technology changes it implies, as well as the constant need for vigilance to ensure business continuity and emergency preparedness to ensure delivery of citizen services during periods of crisis. These challenges can only be adequately addressed by creating strategic perspectives and objectives with respect to the management of government information. Striking the right balance between security and open disclosure, aligning retention and storage practices with the value and importance of content types, ensuring meaningful categorization, metadata assignment and access controls on information throughout all key stages of its creation or capture, revision and review, publication and consumption and final storage and disposition.

Canadians can be proud that our federal government is internationally recognized as a leader in defining Information Governance strategies. The most recent articulation of the "Management of Government Information" mandate by the Treasury Board is clear: government must "...achieve efficient and effective information management to support program and service delivery; foster informed decision making; facilitate accountability; transparency and collaboration; and preserve and ensure access to information and records for the benefit of present and future generations".

Open Text is pleased to be a partner with government to help build an Enterprise Content Management framework as part of a strategic approach to information governance. We are committed to providing ongoing education and communication with its Canadian public sector customer base.

(1) Gartner, Inc "Key Issues for Establishing Information Governance Policies, Processes and Organization", February 2008, Toby Bell, Debra Logan, Ted Friedman

If I were asked to define government work, by tradition, I would say that it has been viewed as being a highly-structured, monolithic, top-down approach environment. But I see this view changing as more and more government agencies begin to introduce new ways to collaborate with its citizens.

The use of Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and social networking is beginning to fundamentally transform business models and change the way organizations think about collaborative relationships. These tools can deliver to the public sector tremendous opportunities to make-over service delivery, make smarter policies, flatten silos and reinvigorate government. They can also help in streamlining internal operations, increasing effectiveness of government information, and attracting the next generation Y'ers that are tech savvy by enabling them to stay in tune with the needs of the next generation.

I think most of us would agree that sound policy making in our government is best when it is done as a collective -- by public policy makers (government) and the public it serves (citizens and stakeholders). It is our hope that with the use of open 2.0 style tools, the development of Government 2.0 will mean that knowledge will no longer flow from institution to the population, but will be co-created with citizens. Government of the people, by the people, for the people...who knew that the World Wide Web would brings us one small step closer to the vision Lincoln outlined so many years ago.

I look forward to exploring and discussing this topic more at the upcoming Canadian Public Sector Days this week. To learn more about the basics of Web 2.0 join me at my breakout session entitled: What the Canadian Public Sector Needs to Know About Web 2.0.

Open Text is proudly supporting the 25th Anniversary conference of the RMAA (Records Management Association of Australasia) here in Sydney this week. With delegates from all over Australia, New Zealand and Asia, as well as sponsors and speakers from Canada, U.S. and Europe, Day 1 proved to be jam-packed with sessions addressing all aspects of electronic and physical records management practices and trends. Presenters did a great job relating their topics and research to the conference theme of "Adopting and Adapting" - a theme reflects well on the changing nature of the records management profession and its need to keep pace with the increasingly electronic work environment in this era of compliance pressures.

The keynote address, by Julie McLeod, Professor of Records Management at Northumbria University in the UK, highlighted some key research areas she and her task force have been looking at this year. Adoption rates of the ISO 15489 Records Management standard in the UK, a review of four key Information and Records Management readiness toolkits, and a survey of the adoption issues records professional face when instituting new programs were the three key areas of discussion. More by Professor McLeod's team here in their research blog: http://acerm.blogspot.com. They are actively looking for survey participants.

The topic of what Records Managers need to know about Web 2.0 and Social Media is clearly the hot topic of the day. My own session as well as a similarly-themed session by KM guru Kim Sbarcea, were both standing room only. An estimated 100 people in each of the sessions heard more about the changing face of the enterprise and where to start thinking about adopting and adapting to new content creation, collaboration and social software tools that are entering the enterprise and helping to harness the collective wisdom of information workers.

The key takeaways? Embrace your peer-to-peer communities, use 2.0 tools to create your voice as an expert, and take the rewards while keeping an eye on the risks of freeing up channels of communication and information exchange.

Earlier this year, Open Text became the first supplier to achieve full compliance with the demanding VERS (Victorian Electronic Records Strategy) records management standards and have just been awarded panel contract status by the New South Wales Government to provide Information Asset Management System (IAMS) to government departments and agencies throughout the state.

If you are at the conference, please be sure to visit Open Text's booth. Sign up to test your talents in our Guitar Hero competition, learn more about our new offerings and have some fun networking with your peers.

This week I was in Grapevine, Texas where the annual International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference was held. ILTA has been going strong for several years now, but I have to say this year was one of the best conferences I've been to yet with regards to the session content, the great people I spoke with all week and of course the great venue.

The week was especially successful for us at the show because we saw a lot of traction at the booth and also to our peer group sessions, as a result of some of the announcements we made this week.

Our email management session was the most popular (it was a full house!). A few of our clients put together some key points about their approach to email management, which been a hot topic for quite awhile and is one of the main reasons we announced our new email lifecycle management solution this week.

As we mentioned in the announcement, the offering addresses the largest business problem facing firms these days, which is managing enormous volumes of client- and matter-related emails. To solve this problem, we took our email archiving capabilities for Microsoft Exchange, tied it together with our LegalKEY records management system, and added a series of efficient filing components to really give firms the power to manage the entire lifecycle of emails from creation to disposition.

The offering also addresses key concerns at most firms, such as scalability, user adoption and compliance when it comes to implementing the right system, but really these are the key things we focus on with every solution we come out with.

This week we also got to announce a couple of new customers who have taken some significant steps towards making their law firms more efficient. Chambliss, Bahner & Stophel for example will be using document management to control its document-based knowledge assets in a secure, integrated, and intuitive environment; while global law firm, Hunton & Williams is in the process of replacing its existing conflicts checking system with our LegalKEY Conflicts Management and New Business Intake systems.

Well, I've pretty much given my last bit of energy this week writing this post. I have to catch my flight back to New York soon and you can bet I'm going to take this long weekend to try to relax and enjoy the sunshine before things get even busier this fall.

Any sanguine observer of web trends and technology generally could not be blamed for rolling their eyes at yet another Web 2.0 corporate initiative. But give us a second to explain. For regarding Web 2.0 - all hype aside -- there really is something worth talking about here. First, it doesn't really matter if you call Web 2.0, Internet 2.0, or the "next next" thing. What the meaning behind the term, whatever term, suggests is that we have reached a common milestone in the development of Internet related technologies generally, and digital media technologies specifically (of particular interest to Artesia, Open Text's Digital Media Group) that taken together enable a fundamentally different approach to putting together large complex systems. Scott Bowen, President of Artesia, talks more about this in our latest podcast launched this week.

It wasn't of course a particular day or time, a specific invention or product, but rather taken writ large we have entered a period of modularity where interoperability and flexibility are as important, if not more so, than sheer functionality (can we do it at all) or performance (yeah we can do it but it takes a week). Where once streaming audio over the Internet was a feat, today video delivered over IP is common place whether online or as part of a service providers infrastructure.

Here at Open Text we're excited about the opportunities these trends present. First our flagship Digital Asset Management product is being used in more and different use cases. Where once perhaps just a very nice and very important virtual filing cabinet, today it is rare where a customer doesn't integrate its enterprise DAM with other systems ranging from online ecommerce systems to backend financial and billing infrastructures. Robust public APIs of course are the secret sauce - the LegosTM of the digital world. Our latest version, Artesia DAM 6.8, for example, shipped with a full complement of web services that have been used to extend the system's core functionality in many directions from large file delivery to web content management integration. We'll be expanding this set of web services even further with future releases and, in fact, are the very method we are using to integrate other products from the Open Text suite including the Business Process server which will make heretowith one-off process changes easy to recreate, re-use, and modify as the situation fits.

Secondly, Web 2.0 means we can build, test, configure, and support our product differently and we expect even more robustly than ever before. Where once DAM was something of an art with custom implementations the norm, over the years our team and the associated technologies have matured such that today we have a standard client services methodology and a range of delivery options from fully integrated behind-the-firewall enterprise DAM to a completely hosted "Artesia On Demand" for which no local IT-infrastructure is required.

So Web 2.0, surely it's been hyped, but don't let the hype distract you from the significant technical trends it represents.