document management evolves for the wider world.

Byline: bobby pickering

document management evolves for the wider world

The big stories in the electronic document and records management system (EDRMS) market in 2006 were the arrival of the heavyweight IT infrastructure suppliers -- IBM bought Filenet, and Oracle snapped up Stellent -- and consolidation within the sector, such as the OpenText/Hummingbird tie-up. But other forces also came into play, as user perceptions of the importance of EDRMS developed.

EDRMS is now seen as an integral platform for business processes as well as compliance issues, says Michael Cliff, general manager for corporate marketing at Tower Software. "The management of information has now been recognised as one of the key disciplines for providing a return to all stakeholders," Cliff says. "EDRMS manages at least 85% of unstructured information. In a growing number of organisations a well-implemented EDRMS is seen as important as corporate HR and financial systems."

As information management goes up the agenda of IT departments, so EDRMS and content management system (CMS) issues have started to gain recognition. Dave Macey, vice-president for international affairs at Stellent, says: "We work with a lot of organisations across many sectors, but in particular public sector and financial services that want to control their content by creating a central records and file plan."

Macey adds that centralised control is key. "Organisations have traditionally bought more storage, applications and databases to manage the growth in information, but now recognise they need a central way of managing it." An EDRMS gives them that control, he say.

Robin Daniels, senior marketing manager EMEA at Vignette, says users need to have organisation-wide oversight. "The uncontrolled deployment of departmental solutions is making enterprise-wide information sharing and management increasingly difficult."