ECM - How much Information?

Note that table above is from the Berkley report. See the end of the article for the URL link.

Well how much information is out there. Berkeley have done some research in 2000 and 2003 to estimate how much information is created each year. Consider just a small sample of the overall facts.

• 1 Gigabyte is a truckload of books. Now think of that little USB stick that you carry around.

The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections. Wow, talk about the new Gutenberg Press and personal print.

The overall estimate is that we generate 800MB of data / information per person. But hey, I have more disk space than than sitting on my desk right now, in fact 1225MB in total running about 70% used ! So the spread is obviously lumped up in those that have technology access.

The report estimates that in 2003 a total of 2-3 exabytes of information were generated and 5 exabytes were all the words spoken by human beings. Maybe we get to a point of cross over. I hope not because if we stop talking to one another we will lose relevance in meaning and connections.

For the full picture of the research link to the full report and findings below, and finally remember there are some good stats here for your next ECM analysis phase.

http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/

ECM Alfresco a customer story

Great to see a customer reference to the implementation of Alfresco for records and document management. I have been following Alfresco for some time now and I came across a set of slides from Islington Council in the UK.

Great to see that Open Source is starting to enter into the traditional ECM Market space, especially around records management. The Jeremy Tuck, Islinton's CIO has a slide deck presentation give a good overview of where they were and where they have got including a high level of the process that they went through. Sure it is high level and you need some solid information management background to fill in the gaps, but he has put in his e-mail address for you to contact him if necessary.

CMS Watch have also put Alfresco into their ECM Suite reports and I find that next to Nuxeo it is one of two potentials if you are looking at Open Source for the technology piece of your ECM solution at a reasonable cost.

But there is a warning here folks, while the community edition is free, if you are looking for scalability or DR facilities then you will need to sign up for a per annum support fee for Alfresco. However this is not a bad option when you consider that the annual maintenance cost of any ECM technology runs at 20% per annum.

HP Enters the ECM Race?

Found an article from Forrester on HP entering the ECM Race (thanks Tower). Click on the link for the full article available form the Tower Software Site.

Forrester states that HP are now confronting the "Four Horsemen" of Enterprise Content Management, guess they mean, EMC, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle ? Just to make sure I did a little googling and found the Forrester ECM 2007 report (thanks Oracle) that indicates this is so, as well as the report noted at the beginning.

But getting back to the overall thought of HP entering the race, what concerns me is how HP are going to compete in the ECM space race? The investment strategy seems to strengthen HP's compliance, archiving and discovery stack, but there is more to the total ECM feature space.

Will HP invest and develop in the other key ECM feature areas? Will they provide a set of "infostructure services" (as opposed to infastructure) to an ECM programme, or are they looking to get out there as an ECM Suite player in their own right. Only time will tell, I would hate to see the Tower Software purchase bury the TRIM engine into the overall HP stack for the sake of just ticking the box on a records management piece.

Guess we are all to stay tuned for the next unfolding in the ECM space race !

ECM - MOSS Architecture.

I deal a lot with MOSS 2007 these days. I guess with $800M in sales and the massive massive marketing machine that Microsoft brings to bear you can avoid it. I believe that even Microsoft themselves have been surprised at the adoption of MOSS 2007 as a platform.

But putting that all aside what fascinates me, and drives me mad is the way that the MOSS 2007 information architecture hangs together. Why? well because I have dealt with other ECM systems before, you tend to come with some well ingrained expectations when you begin to look at MOSS. Expectations such as:

• A single repository for information that is single source, create once and find and edit anywhere


• The ability to set retention and disposal at a system level and configure for the information in context


• The ability to leverage information outside of organisational boundaries eg. have a policy document spread across all departments

So give some of these expectations I found that I had to do a mind bend when starting to dig under the covers of the MOSS platform. Microsoft has an architecture for MOSS that goes like this.

(Click the image to get an enlarged view)

From the diagram you can see that the Site Collection is the logical grouping bucket for information. Now most large organisations that deploy MOSS will have multiple site collections. But here is where the mind bend on my expectations start.


The following features of MOSS 2007 DO NOT work across Site Collections (SC's)

• Content Types - You will need to deploy content types across all other SC's
  
• Content by Query Web Part - aggregates across site(s) but not SC's
  
• Workflow - Only available to the site collection it is deployed to !!!
  
• Information Management and Retention Policies - Only set at the SC level
  
• Search - Certain features so not work across SC's
  
• Quotas - Want to control the space people use, this must be deployed across SC's as well
  

So this starts to create some interesting exercise.

Firstly for the Information Architect / records management experts as they try to make sense of how to construct a classification / metadata / security and access controls.

Secondly for the MOSS Administrators as they try to keep track of the deployment and changes to the information support features that need to be managed as well. This is a ripe area for the 3rd party developers to help and some have already identified the gap.

So the moral is, prior planning prevents a poor deployment !

Greg the Architect. Is there an ECM link here?

Here is a YouTube link to Greg the Architect. While it deals with SOA (that's Service Orientated Architecture) you could swap out SOA for ECM and still have a great laugh, especially with the blue, red and grey team members.


Great piece of marketing by Tibco and I can identify with the Fisher Price Greg, as a look alike is in my daughters toy box. Don't worry Greg they love you. I find this hilarious viewing and was rolling around on the floor. BTW I am off to get that ECM systems migrated into the hardware software and services, and hardware!!