By Dick Weisinger, on February 3rd, 2009
Best-in-class companies like Citibank and AIG have proved that best decisions aren’t always made by best-in-class companies. Nonetheless, to become best-in-class, companies do need to make good decisions and get it right a lot of the time. That’s the premise behind a report on SaaS by the Aberdeen group. The report identifies best-in-class companies and then researched those companys’ strategies around SaaS.
The report found that 75% of those best-in-class companies were using SaaS or planned to migrate to it as a long-term solution. Some key indicators about the attitudes of those companies toward SaaS include these findings:
- 1.4 times more likely to have a CFO who supports SaaS
- 1.8 times more likely to have an IT group with support for SaaS
- 2 times more likely to have a clear definition and understanding of SaaS and on-premise solutions
- 3 times more likely to select vendors with SaaS options and toolkits
By Dick Weisinger, on February 2nd, 2009
Records Management and Enterprise Content Management have a lot in common and often RM systems are built on top of ECM components, but they’re different.
A great article by SmeadSoft details and contrasts the differences between ECM systems, Records Management (RM) systems and Enterprise Information Portals. RM systems differ from ECM systems in that RM systms focus on lifecycles, including retention, disposition, audit and destruction.
Further the RM system ensures that the document/record is retained in its original form with no changes. The analogy given by the SmeadSoft paper is to think of a file or content item as being wrapped in an envelope. ECM focuses on managing the content inside the envelope, while RM focuses on the envelope, managing the confidentiality, safety and security.
By Dick Weisinger, on January 30th, 2009
Last week, coinciding with the swearing in of a new president, Alfresco made the announcement of its ‘Inaugural release’ of Alfresco 3.0 Labs edition. The new software includes a host of new and interesting features:
- First implementation of the OASIS CMIS specification for accessing structured content across heterogeneous repositories
- The first company to replicate SharePoint-like repository interactions from within Microsoft Office applications
- The SURF platform, a REST-enabled AJAX developer toolkit for easily creating rich browser-based applications that heavily depend on structured content
- Alfresco Share, the first SURF-based Alfresco application, targeting on-demand collaboration
- SURF collaboration components like wikis, blogs, forums, calendars, discussions, and social tagging
- Thumbnail and sub-document Flash-based preview
- Email-based collaboration features
- Web Studio drag-and-drop site building functionality
