The COVID-19 pandemic forced enterprises into a full work-from-home mode practically overnight. There was no time to test, evaluate and decide. We were thrown into this “new normal” where anything that can be done remotely is being done remotely. “We’re being forced...
The COVID19 pandemic forced most enterprises to send their employees to work from home. While they were busy implementing new solutions, procedures, and guidelines, employees working from home faced their own set of challenges they weren’t prepared for. In one recent...
A pandemic is not on our minds when we talk about globalization. Serious disease and possible death are some of our worst fears as humans. And let's be honest, we don’t really know how to handle this COVID-19 problem. No one alive has had any first-hand experience in...
Most decision makers will agree that ECM modernization is not something enterprises are keen on doing. The risks that come with modernization are real and can cost a lot, both in terms of stress and in financial costs. However, by not modernizing outdated ECM systems,...
Enterprise content is the currency that moves businesses. And logically, its management is often the key to a business’s success or failure. The very purpose of ECM is managing enterprise content in a way that it stimulates insights and decisions that drive corporate...
The NARA 2019/2022 Deadline is looming. Organizations are scrambling to get organized and meet the deadlines. But, going fully digital isn’t something you can just fly through. There are dozens, even hundreds of questions to consider, from mapping out your content to...
In the first part of this series, I raised the issues of the importance and complexity of meeting the NARA 2019/2022 deadlines. It’s not something you can rush through and companies will need to have a plan before they jump into action. Now I would like to go over the...
In 2012, the Executive Office of the President of USA, Barack Obama issued a memorandum that defined the end of the road for paper-based workflows. The NARA 2019/2022 Deadline, as it’s known in the industry, expects government agencies to fully convert to digital...
The amount of newly generated data keeps growing every day. From about 150 Exabytes in 2005 to almost 1200 Exabytes in 2010, we now create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Read this again, every day. This is a HUGE amount of data. Just over the last two years,...
Several years ago, while I served as an Adjunct Professor at Howard University School of Business, I developed a project-based learning course as requested by the Computer Based Information Systems Department Chair. Each semester, student project teams were given a...
If you are reading this blog post you probably still have contradictory feelings about paper-based and paperless office. Whether we are talking about startups or established vendors we’re all looking for every possible way to streamline operations, cut costs, and save...
Image Source My friend and I ran into each other at the local post office and struck up a conversation. We quickly got into the current events of the recently mailed explosive devices to national political figures. We were just amazed at how fast DHS and USPS...
Even today, organizations still rely on the slow, painful, error-prone manual process of working with data. This can involve scanning various documents, OCR with the mandatory deciphering of bad handwriting, adding needed metadata, properly naming documents to fit...
Many organizations get cold feet when facing the daunting process of migrating to a new ECM. Migrating content that is unattributed, unorganized, and unclassified can fill up the ECM with huge quantities of unwanted data, or it may entirely derail the project. Today’s...
There are many reasons why an organization may face a large ECM data migration. Most of the times companies start thinking of ECM data migration because they want to modernize workflows. Other times, this may be because of a recent acquisition, a part of a strategic...
Having the ability to have a panoramic view of information over the organization in an impeccable and transparent way, has clear business value. The information is no longer just data, but content that can be integrated, interpreted and be more significant to...
How much time and effort do the employees of your organization spend every year looking for key documents, missing reports, e-mail authorizing an action, or data files with important information for verifying some corporate action or making business decisions?...
Content migration is a complex process for every organization. It is an enterprise-wide data management process that is tedious and demands huge amounts of resources. Content migration is a challenging process since it can become extremely difficult if you have a lot...
For successful organizations, it is not good enough just to implement an ECM solution and hope to get the best of it. It takes time to plan, adjust and particularly time to pick the right vendor that will meet all the needs of one organization. As a matter of fact,...
The cloud is growing to be a very compelling approach for organizations to host ECM applications, offering reliable computing power, flexible cost models, and lots of off-premise support assembled conveniently in an enterprise content management service agreement....
It is almost impossible for one organization to function well without a good enterprise content management (ECM) system. Organizations are generating sensitive and valuable content on a daily basis, so setting up a robust enterprise content management system is...
Client Experience heavily influences client retention, loyalty, and advocacy – all important factors for modern organizations. Managing the client experience, however, can prove to be challenging, and there are myriad considerations to weigh when creating a client...
As we mentioned in the previous article, before migrating to a new ECM system you should consider an assessment of your current ECM system that takes a complete view of the tools and processes you are currently using. Comparing your current ECM system to the...
Does your current ECM system work properly for your organization? Is it easy to use? Or you do find it daunting and even intimidating? If you do get ECM headaches, it may be time for you to start thinking upgrading or migrating away from your current ECM system and...
Modern records management software is designed to control records retention and disposition within an organization systematically and to offer key personnel an easy and quick access to discover information for various reason to include legal holds. For the most part,...
As you know from a previous post, it bothers me that out-of-the-box, D2 does NOTHING. In an effort to help validate D2 v4.5 installations and provide a test environment for my DQL Editor widget, I developed a simple "starter" application that I named "D-Top". D-Top...
In this video, ArkCase demonstrates how to seamlessly integrate Ephesoft's document capture solution with the ArkCase Case Management solution. Contact our expert ArkCase team today to learn how we can help you!
In this video Deja Nichols walks you through creating a legal hold within Alfresco Records Management. For more information about Alfresco Records Management, contact our experts today.
In this video, Armedia Records Management expert Deja Nichols will show you how to use various search features within Alfresco Records Management. Looking for help with your Alfresco Records Management solution? Contact our experts today to learn how we can help!
In this video, Armedia's Records Management expert, Deja Nichols, gives you an overview of the Alfresco Records Management Module. Stay tuned for more from our Alfresco Records Management video blog series!
Recently our team has been asked several questions about how to best utilize Alfresco Records Management for their various government and business needs. In response to that, our in-house Records Management specialist, Deja Nichols, will be posting a series of...
A few years ago I started a project with a new customer. When I was granted access to their DEV, QA, and PROD environments I was given a bookmark file that contained all of the URLs I would need to manage and administer their systems (for example: DA, Webtop, and...
Our minds are so complex, they constantly capture and use context you most likely have never even considered. Many illusions (or the latest blue/black vs. gold/white dress controversy), are due to the fact your mind is working without you really being aware of what it...
The upgrade path should be as simple as upgrading Windows Server 2008 R2 Server-Core Domain Controller to Windows Server 2012 Core. However, this is not the case. Most Internet solutions will write of this upgrade path without Active Directory services. This is an...
Is there a way to quickly find similar documents in a Documentum repository? Yes, there is. One approach could be to use the Lucene MoreLikeThis() API. This API call to the Lucene Full Text search engine extracts what it believes to be the most salient words from a...
Ultimately many would want to write complex RPMs to install software packages, however, those who are accountable for writing such packages may agree that this task may be cumbersome and impractical. Where the RPM may accomplish the goal of wrapping an application in...
Overview of Ephesoft Security With an introduction of Single Sign-On (SSO) and other great new features, such as new Extraction (Fuzzy Key Field, Zone Extraction, Regular Expression Builder) and Classification (Test Classification Tool, Advanced DA Switch,...
For those of you who may not have heard, Ephesoft 3.1 is now available and last week an in-depth demo of the new features was recorded. You can view the Ephesoft feature demo here: For those without the 1 hour and 18 minutes to spare, below are some of the...
An approach for enhancing a customers’ satisfaction with Documentum’s built-in full text search capabilities is to provide them with a thesaurus of terms relevant to their industry, region, or business process. For example, suppose a user needs to find all the...
As a business analyst, I’m often asked the types of daily activities that I perform and how I can best serve my customer. First, and most importantly, Business Analysts (BA’s) are the customer’s advocate. We’re the good cops....
It's been a long time (OK, a few years) since I last wrote about ArkCase. What's been happening since then? We wrote the ArkCase framework using Spring and Spring MVC. It was successful: we supported a few customers. One customer was very large and required many...
When creating an ECM charter, one of the first things that should be accomplished is deciding who within your organization should be a member of this core team. This step is extremely important, as these members will be responsible for the project scope within the...
Information: The Lifeblood of the Enterprise Timely access to critical information separates the winners from the losers in today’s information economy. Yet all too often knowledge workers fail in their quest to obtain the information they need. There are many reasons...
Ephesoft is a great open architecture capture platform, and it is easy to find blogs and articles that support this. However, not as much is available out there to provide solution or development tips for the platform. So, as one of the frontier Ephesoft developers...
As system integrators and specialists in enterprise content management (ECM), Armedia is often called upon to migrate customers from one ECM system to another, or to upgrade their current system to a new platform -- or some combination of these things. Inevitably, we...
Armedia's Caliente is a high-performance content migration tool designed to quickly and easily import content and metadata into a variety of leading content management systems (CMS). Caliente has been used in numerous projects delivered by Armedia and is currently in...
Recently, some colleagues and I were discussing whether the Content Server truncated result sets for large queries. They insisted that it did and that the largest result set Documentum would return was 1000 rows or 350 rows from any single source (the default values...
You probably know that Documentum (in its default state) stores content on the file system and retains a pointer to the content in its database. Likely, you have navigated the file store on the Content Server and discovered directories like...
In our last blog we discussed the value and inherent benefits of integrating Alfresco, the open source enterprise content management platform, and Ephesoft, the open source intelligent document capture solution, in an enterprise solution. In this blog, let’s look at...
In today’s world, it is critical that businesses and government organizations are able to capture and fully utilize all of the information they have at their disposal, this includes information found on both paper and electronic documents. This is where intelligent...
Over the past several years there has been a significant growth of interest around paperless office initiatives, as well as usage of enterprise-wide Records/ Document management solutions. However, a vast number of office-related tasks are still being conducted on...
There are a number of blogs out there that talk about the EMC products that integrate SharePoint 2010 with Documentum along with the pros and cons of each product. However, I found the task of locating authoritative references to be infinitely more challenging....
Like many, Armedia has customers who are upgrading their desktop computing environments from Windows XP to Windows 7 (Did anyone use Vista?). We recently ran into an interesting situation with one such customer who was using a customized WebDAV solution to allow users...
Let’s start with understanding why Metadata is important for search. Metadata provides the descriptive tags that act as a reference point for the search engines in determining what should be associated with that specific piece of content. As depicted in the image...
In a Statement by Dr. David McClure, Associate Administrator, Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technology, at an April 2011 Senate Subcommittee Hearing, McClure stated one of the biggest challenges federal agencies face in migrating to the cloud is...
In the IT project world, conversations are technically based. In the business world, focus is on applications and business needs. This can (and often does) lead to the true personal value of these systems being overlooked. Armedia had been awarded a contract with...
As solution integrators, our greatest value comes from understanding the ins and outs of “the spaces between” our clients existing systems, but we expect stares as blank as a freshly cleaned whiteboard when offering such an explanation. Our challenge then becomes “How...
Without a doubt, one of the biggest challenges government it solutions have had to overcome in recent years is handling FOIA requests. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is the law which requires federal agencies to provide access to documents and information that...
Throughout my many years of experience in the system and software development area, I have noticed one major thing that always seems to be at the top of requirements but becomes relegated to somewhere lower in priority as the project proceeds, only to come back to the...
It was in the fall of 2010 when I got a call that began my engagement on one of the most interesting projects that I have worked on in recent times. The situation, the project was with one of the leading product safety regulators in the world. The international arm...
[turns up amplifier, cranks up volume to 11, puts Huey Lewis and the News vinyl on record player....] I start up Visual Studio 6.0 and settle down to some nostalgic programming with Visual Basic (VB) 6. Ah, college memories come flooding back and strangely not many...
Hi, this is Scott Roth. I am new to Armedia and Armedia's blog. I have been watching the past few weeks as Dave, Tim and Judy have shared their cutting edge technology lessons learned with you. Personally, I have found these posts incredibly insightful and had to...
A while back I described the problems I had checking files out of SharePoint 2010 using CMIS REST bindings (more specifically, using the excellent Apache Chemistry OpenCMIS client API for CMIS). At the time, it seemed odd to me Microsoft would release a CMIS stack...
A while back I wrote about checking out a SharePoint 2010 file using CMIS. Getting checkout working excited me so much I forgot to try checking the file back in! Turns out there are a few tricks. We use Apache Chemistry as our CMIS client. Chemistry's checkin method...
In a previous blog I discussed "how to" enable the Content Management Interoperability Service (CMIS) in SharePoint 2010. In that blog I also reviewed the SharePoint built in Web Part for getting data from a CMIS enabled site using WSDL. In this blog I will show how...
This is the second of two blogs where I demonstrate how to use the openCMIS library from a JAVA client to connect to a CMIS enabled SharePoint site through the REST Atom service of SharePoint. My previous blog “SharePoint 2010 – REST Atom Service.” provided...
This is the first of two blogs where I demonstrate how to use the openCMIS library from a JAVA client to connect to a CMIS enabled SharePoint site through the REST Atom service of SharePoint. The “lessons learned” and tips I include come from examining MSDN and...
I was tasked to create a SharePoint site and enable it for CMIS access from a java application we were developing. Since this was new to me, I wanted to establish a SharePoint to SharePoint connection using CMIS before trying to connect from our java...
If you asked me three months ago if I enjoy developing to Alfresco’s repository and Share UI (specifically Enterprise 3.3.3), it would have been a frustrated “NO…” -- Not frustration about WANTING to learn a new product, since that is always exciting and challenging,...
I’m sure that some of you read the title of this blog and feared that someone missed spell check when titling it CONNtext; however the unusual spelling is quite intentional. CONNtext, a play on the words connector and context, is an Armedia developed solution that...
In my previous blog, Data, the Neglected Part of Content Management, I discussed the importance of structured data within a cms. Getting a good structured data design to compliment the design of the overall content management solution can be dirty work; not quite...
I call it "the question". You're in a crowded conference room and someone asks, (and it's usually with the senior manager present), "could you give me a definition of content management?" Everyone looks at you, the learned professional for some wise insightful...
In my years of working in the content management space I've experienced the challenges of switching horses, sorry I mean platform vendors more than once. Terminology aside, it's hard to quickly understand let alone master a new platform simply because how each...
When you work for a while in the software you get numbed to “technologies have come and gone...” occasionally though some become commodities and others trend setters. We have seen that with many products like Apache, Tomcat, Lucene, Drupal …etc that have stabilized...
In the 90’s, when ECM solutions were rare, we could get away with designing solely toward requirements, but there is too much at stake nowadays. A recent study sampling various IT projects reported that: 62% percent of projects fail to meet their schedules 49% are...
It was year 2004, when I was first introduced to EMC Documentum. As I first fired up the DAB IDE, I felt man this IDE is Unintuitive, slow and cryptic. Apart from learning the DFC API’s in Documentum, getting accustomed to DAB itself was an excruciating experience....
A simple goal – “export, transform, load” – the destination is a matter of choice. EMC eRoom is going away. It has been marked as End of Life (EOL) so what next? EMC Documentum have 2 options: EMC Documentum Collaboration Services; EMC Documentum Centerstage. ...
Too expensive. Too bulky. Too consumer oriented. Too many existing competitors. Too niche. Too proprietary. Too slow... Oh yeah, lots of negativity. Wise words? Truly wise...if your standards are at or below Peter Griffin's. Otherwise: NO, NOPE, COMPLETELY WRONG....
“What is a record?” This is the fundamental question that must be answered before answering "What is records management". Without a clear answer to that question, one cannot determine record titles, develop and apply retention schedules, structure file plans or manage...
Impact of EMC’s partnership with Fatwire to provide Web Content Management offerings in place of its own existing WCM products
Cloud computing and its impact on ECM. Advances in Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.
One of the often overlooked challenges of electronic records management is the control and maintenance of retention policies. This is particularly difficult if you are faced with a large number of members in your organization's different record series categories. ...
There are well over 35 proprietary document management systems, an astronomical number of homegrown document management systems, and billions of sources for information to come from. As technology changes, new and better features are added to current systems, new...
“I was making my plans when life happened.” (John Lennin) I should have Googled that quote. What just happened? I presented a “quote.” I discredited the quote and myself by admitting that I did not do even minimal research on a commonly used Web source. I misspelled...
You may have heard of the Reveille Management Console for Documentum D5/D6 and Reveille for Captiva InputAccel – the only solutions that can proactively and automatically monitor, diagnose and repair your DCTM/Captiva installation, but what is Reveille RealTime (RRT),...
There have been a large number of articles published regarding electronic health records. I wanted to share my thoughts given that Health IT an area that I believe has a tremendous amount of potential. This topic is nothing new, it has been discussed, tried,...