For Project Managers of document and records initiatives
From development of the business case, to data migration, to maintaining the system once it is fully rolled-out Allianza Discovery is useful at all stages of your EDRMS project. Discovery will help you:
- Scope unstructured data and file duplicates, determine aging profiles for different file-types etc.
- Classify data as to business importance.
- Migrate files to an EDRMS, to archive, or to the bin.
- Monitor compliance with policy.
- Report on performance indicators such as amount of unstructured information, types, sources, frequency of duplicates and more.
Reduce risk in your document and records project
If you are in the process of planning, rolling out, or maintaining a document or records management system, looking at file deduplication, or simply interested in reducing wasted storage space, then you will need to sort out network files. Documents, spreadsheets, presentations, web pages, multimedia files and emails – these files may represent up to 85% of data on the network of an organization.
This unstructured data needs to be tidied up, deduplicated where necessary, and valuable files migrated to a system such as an EDRMS (Electronic Document and Records Management System).
Where’s the risk?
These EDRMS (or DMS or CMS or whatever) roll-out projects are typically complex, risky and have a high failure rate. Sometimes they seem to drag on forever, and are never fully implemented. The roll-out may only ever extend to a small motivated group of users – typically the original ‘Trial Group’.
OK, so what’s the problem?
Problems with EDRMS roll-outs are typically related to change management issues. Users have their way of doing things, of managing their documents and other files, and they don’t like change. During the time of transition to the new system, they are likely to be in a limbo where some of their documents are in the new system, and the rest are still held on a file server or locally. This makes it a lot harder to manage files, and they blame the new EDRMS.
Part of the problem is that Windows, and to an extent other network file systems, doesn’t provide a simple and intuitive way to systematically find, sort and manage documents and other files globally across the network. The result is that information managers in charge of a document and records project, such as the roll-out of a new EDRMS, find data migration difficult.
It’s not simply the ability to move files around
Data must be sorted before it can be moved to the EDRMS. Many files will require review by a human, usually the user/owner, as part of the triage process towards deletion, archiving, or migration to the EDRMS. We need a systematic way of approaching this triage process.
The solution
People find working with lists intuitive. Working with a list, and ticking things off as they are completed, is an intuitive way of tackling a large project, such as tidying up a network file system.
Allianza Discovery is a file management—harvesting- tool that leverages this basic observation.
Allianza Discovery delivers a global view of the network file system. It provides a systematic approach to triaging files, on servers, mail servers, personal workstations and storage appliances.
Allianza Discovery is not an EDRMS, but a file management tool designed to complement your preferred EDRMS solution.
How it works
Allianza Discovery can be installed in a few minutes. It scans the specified file servers, shares, workstations, and Microsoft Exchange mail servers of interest and creates a list of all files found including email attachments.
