Mare Nostrum

Records management for the masses

Several years ago, if you said that many basic document management features like versioning, custom metadata, and workflow should go mainstream, most people treated you as if you'd been sitting out in the sun too long. (There, there. Sit down, take a deep breath, and relax. Put document management back into its comfortable little mental niche. Feel better?)

Now, it's taken for granted that the average person needs more than just file storage. Whether you're more worried about how to collaborate in cross-organizational teams, or how to meet organizational or regulatory standards for document retention, the file server doesn't give you everything you need. ECM tools are overkill, and in any case, they're generally too expensive and difficult to roll out to a mass audience, even if the average person had the time and inclination to learn a complex document management system.

Gartner pioneered the term "basic content services," which is bleeding into the lexicon of the IT industry at large. (I've heard people in IT departments, the press, and--horrors!--even other analyst firms use the term.) Basic content services are, in a nutshell, "document management for the masses"--something that, several years ago, seemed as plausible as a nuclear-powered can opener.

Records management is merely a sub-species of document management. It's suffering from the same problems that infliced DM: it's treated as a niche application that only a few people really can or should use. Unfortunately, the broader organizational imperative behind RM, "Thou shalt handle important content according to the proper guidelines," has to involve a larger group of people who create, secure, update, and dispose of content.

These assumptions shaped our design of Xythos Enterprise Document Manager 6.0, which is an attempt to create "records management for the masses." People know that we can do "document management for the masses," a.k.a. basic content services. Now, we have an official certification from the people behind the DoD 5015.2 standard that we do records management right, and it's embedded in the normal experience of a Xythos user. We haven't made that person's life more complex; in fact, in at least one important way, we've actually made some regular tasks far easier.

If you don't believe me, you're welcome to join us for the March 1 web seminar about the 6.0 release. Feel free to hurl objections at us, if what we've built doesn't cut the mustard, usability-wise or records management-wise.