Legal KM

If you are evaluating ECM solutions, particularly if you are interested in cost, you need to take a look at Alfresco’s TCO Whitepaper. In it, Alfresco uses licensing numbers they snagged from the United States government to compare the first year costs of their solution with EMC/Documentum, OpenText, and Sharepoint.

Alfresco does a good job of avoiding Marketing speak for the most part and simply laying out the facts.

The paper shows that for document management plus collaboration and integration with SharePoint, you’d have to pay EMC/Documentum $863,937.98 for a 1000 user configuration as opposed to $318,738 for SharePoint and $33,500 for Alfresco for similarly-sized systems with equivalent functionality. Those numbers exclude the supporting infrastructure software.

why law firms need to invest more time in developing a sound information infrastructure before adding the latest and greatest technology.

Decisiv Email employs advanced categorization and conceptual search technology to automatically tag, organize, and file email messages and associated attachments with virtually no user involvement.

Additionally, you can use Decisiv Email as an email archiving tool. Recommind claims that using Decisiv Email to store business records delivers up to 500% in storage savings over traditional email archiving systems while substantially reducing litigation risk and eDiscovery costs.

Decisiv Email sells for $300 per user for perpetual licenses.

First there is an effort to better structure information as it is captured. Second, there are efforts to create structure out of chaotic information (a.k.a. BLOBs), which is where next-generation search tools come into play.

For now I will break search into three categories: Keyword, Concept and Semantic.

Keyword or word searching, for this discussion, is that of searching for exact word matches.

here's a round-up of what some of the leading industry prognosticators are saying about what they think is in store for everyone's favorite pervasive global network next year.

One of the advantages to using a platform approach is the integration of the various pieces in one place, with a unified look and searching. We have been using Sharepoint as the platform for our intranet for many years

We have been experiencing problems with the notification feature for wikis in Sharepoint. When there is a change to a wiki page, it sends out the whole wiki page with no indication of the changes.

I was stunned to find out the problem was not us. It was them. The Sharepoint wiki will not send out the changes. It merely sends out the entire wiki page.

"SharePoint Next": Call, Raise Or Fold

Communities & Social Networks: Think "Adoption", Not "Deployment"

Social Platforms: Managing The Gap

There are many reasons why our clients choose open source. Some clients are initially attracted to open source by the idea that they may be able to lower their total cost of ownership by shifting a portion of their license dollars to services and saving the rest. While that is a consideration, it’s not the whole story. In addition to lower cost, there are at least three other major factors that make assembling solutions from open source components an attractive option for our clients: Open source solutions are often a better fit. Open source solutions are often standards-based. Open source solutions are more transparent.

Connectors, in my experience, are one of the surprises that often bedevil licensees. These code chunks make it possible for the licensee to index information that reside in systems or files within an organization. A vendor who does not provide connectors leaves the customer with some stark options; for example, don’t index the content or pay for a new connector. If Mr. Stamper is correct, Autonomy’s connectors are a definite plus for the IDOL system.

When it comes to departmental file sharing or collaborative workspaces, Microsoft's SharePoint has legions of fans in midsized companies. But for those not interested in paying for SharePoint (the basic version is free), or who find some features immature in the latest version, there are SharePoint alternatives.

The move to MOSS 2007 seems to be natural once users install Office 2007.

Midmarket companies accounted for 35% of the respondents, and among this group, half said price was not an inhibitor for MOSS deployments. Although nearly half -- 46% -- said the price was higher than they expected.

For a time, Autonomy’s closest search rival was Verity, until Autonomy bought the company for $500m in November 2005. After that, it was the Norwegian company, Fast Search and Transfer (FAST) that seemed to be the nearest rival.

in January this year FAST was bought by Microsoft for $1.2bn, though it is being operated as a subsidiary, of which Lervik is still CEO.

But even at its peak, FAST was not making anything like Autonomy’s revenue. In the last quarter as an independent entity before it was acquired – the third quarter of 2007 – FAST announced sales of $35.6m, up just 4%. In the same quarter of that year, Autonomy announced its sales rose 49% to $89.6m.