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Thursday, May 03, 2007
RM by any other name
When we designed the 6.0 version of Enterprise Document Manager, we took some pains to make its features generally useful. The 5015.2 requirements looked, from a particular angle, like many of the features we already planned. Disposition rules and vital record indicators are, more or less, the ways in which you'd automate the lifecycle of content. Final disposition reflects the formal rules of good content hygiene--get rid of junk you don't need, handle other content with care--that's a general priority in many organizations today.
Therefore, as a product manager, a lot of questions I've been answering lately take the form of, "When would I use the new 6.0 features to...?" That's one reason why I wrote the institutional repository white paper, to describe how you might use the RM and non-RM features in a particular scenario.
I'm writing another white paper, this time covering the options for plugging our technology into an e-portfolio project. Much of the discussion will be the same: when do you use particular features, and how?
It'd be great if there were a single answer. However, not everyone means the same thing by the term, "e-portfolio." Making RM a hidden or subtle part of collaboration is new, so most people need to ponder how "RM by any other name" might help creating, publishing, maintaining, and exporting an e-portfolio.
In a couple of years, maybe, e-portfolios will become more better defined, and RM integrated into collaboration will become more commonplace. Until then, it takes a little extra explanation, or a quick demo, to get to that "Aha!" moment.