Filenet Corp. announced last week the acquisition of compliance specialist Yaletown Technology Group for an undisclosed amount of cash. In conjunction with its new purchase, FileNet introduced the latest revision of its FileNet Records Manager Suite, Version 3.5, featuring new Intelligent Retention and Content Federation Services capabilities.
A software development and OEM partner of FileNet for more than 10 years, Yaletown, of Vancouver, British Columbia, will allow FileNet to assume control of its Records Crawler and Email Manager products. Integrated with FileNet P8s Records Manager and Email Manager suites, Records Crawler uses preset rules to monitor network file systems to automatically determine when a piece of content is created, moved or altered and has undergone classification to determine whether it should be managed as a record.
Intelligent Retention, equipped with a rules-by-variability system, allows users to manage content more effectively once it is under control. This helps simplify the diverse state and federal rule sets surrounding specific forms of content, according to Craig Rhinehart, director of Compliance Products and Markets for FileNet, in Costa Mesa, Calif.
For its part, FileNets enhanced Content Federation Services buoys records management control with access controls and has the ability to manage documents, such as official company records, in other repositories in one central place.
Overseeing a major project to shift his corporation toward a stabilized and common records management, Larry Hawkins, director of records and information compliance for FirstEnergy Corp., in Akron, Ohio, said the process is tedious but necessary.
“This company is over 110 years old. In the past 10 years we have quadrupled in size, a lot of that growth by acquisition and expansion of our coverage area across other state borders,” said Hawkins. “Weve acquired a lot of different companies and architectures, and we were outgrowing those clothes as we speak. … [Records management] was hard with those disparate systems in place.”
Compounding the problem, Hawkins said, was each separate site managing its own regulatory requirements, record-keeping practices and facilities with different rules and software in place.
To realign his organizations various records management, compliance and common practices in a single repository, Hawkins has deployed FileNets software. The mammoth project involves merging 10 different index imaging systems and mapping up to 20 million physical records. Corralling e-mail is on deck for next year through FileNets new technology.
“Our e-mail, typical of most companies in the U.S., was not tightly managed from Day One. Right now we believe there are a lot of business records and potential evidence that sits in our e-mail,” said Hawkins. “I see the FileNet application being the repository of things we capture and retain outside the e-mail system. It will be a tremendous timesaver.”
In related news, next month Open Text Corp. will unveil LiveLink ECM (enterprise content management) for Records Management 3.0. The updated product provides a single management interface offering the ability to extend records management classifications across multiple content repositories, as well as across compliance and archive layers down to storage devices, said officials of Open Text, in Waterloo, Ontario.