IBM: Blurring Lotus Notes and Enterprise Content Management
August 6, 2008
Marketwatch appears to have picked up an IBM news release and posted the write up without any editorial massaging. You can read “IBM eDiscovery Software Helps Organizations Win the Compliance Battle” here. The purpose of the news release was to explain that IBM offers “Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software designed to help clients meet challenging legal discovery requirements.” A couple of years ago, I had to take a look at IBM’s content management services. These ranged from FileNet to applications deployed within WebSphere. In addition, IBM was actively involved in deploying Documentum, albeit in some remarkably interesting situations that feathered the nest of some legal eagles.
This IBM news release and Marketwatch “news” story asserts that IBM has “enterprise content management” which complements Lotus Notes. The “new” approach “helps organizations win the compliance battle.” Hmmm. I thought compliance was a requirement designed to assure that certain actions were taken. I don’t think of compliance as a battle, but I’m not IBM. I was just a fellow asked to figure out what IBM offered in the way of content management. The real news in this release is that IBM is pushing into eDiscovery, which is neither enterprise content management nor compliance work. eDiscovery is its own separate thing, but obviously IBM is setting me straight. The news story on Marketwatch said:
IBM’s eDiscovery software is the first to leverage a complete ECM platform to transform the process of eDiscovery by proactively managing electronically stored evidence. The new eDiscovery software integrates with IBM’s auto-classification and records management technology to help IT departments manage information for compliance and electronic discovery requests. IBM eDiscovery software also integrates with IBM’s content-centric business process management (BPM) capabilities to help organizations standardize, control and automate legal discovery workflows and enable third-party components as needed.
Let’s think about this. IBM has “new” software that:
- Is Lotus Notes
- Is Enterprise Content Management
- Performs eDiscovery
- Integrates business process management
- Performs compliance requests
- Manages electronically stored evidence
- Hooks into automatic classification
- Connects to records management.
I am a bit confused. One “new” product is the digital equivalent of the entire stock list of AsSeenOnTV.com? I find this remarkable and pretty close to science fiction. But I am an addled goose in an acid rain soaked hollow in rural Kentucky. Those folks in Armonk and Almaden are sure capable innovators. I wasn’t sure every buzz word in search and content processing could be squeezed into one meaty “news” release.
Stephen Arnold, August 6, 2008
Comments
One Response to “IBM: Blurring Lotus Notes and Enterprise Content Management”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
The return value of the Java method getItemValueString has been changed in Lotus Domino 6. 5. 5, Lotus Domino 7. 0 and later releases. Before 6. 5. 5 the method getItemValueString returns null if the item is empty or if the item does not exist. In 6. 5. 5, 7. 0 and later releases getItemValueString returns the empty string (“”) instead.