Today we announced that Hasbro, Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, The Supreme Court of the Netherlands, GM Europe, and Bruce Power are the winners of our 2008 GlobalStar Enterprise Awards. The awards were handed out at the company's recent Open Text Content World conference. Transport Canada, Fonterra Co-operative Group, HOVENSA, and Multiquip were presented with first runner-up awards.

The GlobalStar Enterprise Awards are presented annually to recognize customers from around the world for their outstanding efforts in deriving business value from innovative and successful ECM deployments. To determine the finalists for the GlobalStar Enterprise Awards, each entry is based on scope, business value, end-user benefits, innovation, functionality, and business problem solving ability.

The award categories are designed to coincide with the primary business values of the Open Text ECM Suite: Control, Empower, Agility, and Experience. The Open Text ECM Suite enables customers to control the risk and cost related to their content, empower people and effective decision-making, provide business agility and innovation, and deliver solutions using a compelling experience for end-users. Additionally, the Ground-Breaking Award recognizes the most innovative solution and the Overall Strategic Success Award to the organization best exemplifying the orchestration of people, process, and content.

Overall Strategic Success Award Winner:

• Hasbro

GlobalStar Enterprise Award - Control:

• Winner - Halliburton
• Runner-Up - Transport Canada

GlobalStar Enterprise Award - Empower:

• Winner - Northrop Grumman Corporation
• Runner-Up - Fonterra Co-operative Group

GlobalStar Enterprise Award - Agility:

• Winner - The Supreme Court of the Netherlands
• Runner-Up: HOVENSA

GlobalStar Enterprise Award - Experience:

• Winner - GM Europe
• Runner-Up - Multiquip

Ground-Breaking Award Winner:

• Bruce Power

Over the past few years, as the volume of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) being created by has grown exponentially, organizations have struggled with decisions around the risks of getting rid of ESI and the costs and risks of keeping everything. The recent changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the United States have helped to galvanize companies' thinking around retention policies for ESI. With the cost of eDiscovery being proportional to the amount of ESI in the organization, something has to be done to stem the affects of the compound annual growth of over 60% expected for unstructured content in the enterprise!

Luckily, in the same FRCP amendments, there also lies an answer. The newly amended Rule 37(f) provides that sanctions will not be imposed if a party does not retain ESI as a result of routine, good-faith operation of an electronic information system. However, in order for a party to establish that the deletion of ESI resulted from the routine and good faith operation of their system, the party must be able to demonstrate the existence of an established, well-documented and systemized electronic records management process.

This has caused forward-looking organizations to examine their records management and content management policies and capabilities to determine if they can be used to defensibly reduce the cost and risk associated with eDiscovery. They have determined that end-users will have greater responsibility for correctly identifying and dealing with records in their earliest stages of creation. In order to not create a drag on productivity, companies are looking to solutions that allow for the transparent application of records management classification on content as part of the way that end-users already work. Additionally, with a myriad of content creating applications available, companies look for integrations to a common library where content can be stored, classified, searched and disposed of in a consistent manner.

While application of good records management policies will significantly reduce the cost of eDiscovery in the long term, many companies are burdened with the high cost of eDiscovery now and are likely to see increases in the coming years. Reducing the cost of eDiscovery is a top priority in the current economic environment.

As announced yesterday, our strategy is to help companies cut costs and risk of eDiscovery by allowing them to create defensible, repeatable processes for responding to eDiscovery requests and in the process:

• Reduce the involvement of IT in the collections process
• Reduce the volume of ESI collected by searching for the content "in place" to cull on collect
• Manage the single greatest source of risk in eDiscovery, application of a legal hold on content
• Manage the single greatest cost in eDiscovery - review - by significantly reducing the volume of content and by pre-tagging and categorizing content prior to sending the content to Outside Counsel
• Significantly reduce processing costs by processing content internally and eliminating 3rd party processing

Well Open Text Content World was a big success this year -- check out some of the highlights from the event this week. Hats off to our own Ginny Bartosek who did a wonderful job as our podcast host.

Check out what Ginny Bartosek has to say today about what's going on at Content World.

Day two at Open Text Content World - Ginny Bartosek talks about getting connected, attendee expectations, networking opportunities and pre-conference events.

To be sure competition among vendors is good for customers of enterprise content management software, driving innovation and a strong commitment to meeting customer needs. But there also comes a time when competitors need to drop the gloves and work together to create standards that allow various software applications to work together with less effort.

As announced last month, seven leading ECM and enterprise software companies, including Open Text, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, have joined up to collaborate on the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. This proposed open standard is intended to offer new ways for content applications to "talk" to content repositories and has been submitted for acceptance as an OASIS standard.

While the history of cross-vendor collaboration isn't without its share of false-starts, I have a feeling that this time around is different. One piece of evidence is that it is already well down the road toward becoming real. For example, our development team at Open Text in conjunction with our partners at SAP AG have already created a working prototype that uses the CMIS standard to manage content from SAP applications with Open Text Enterprise Library Services.

In a podcast interview I recently completed, I made the point that this functional prototype demonstrates practically the theory behind this interface. This more than just "slideware" and I'm confident that this is going to move into product in the near future. A standard such as CMIS represents the maturing of the ECM market.
One of the main reasons I'm bullish about CMIS is that it offers customers a host of benefits including an improved end user experience, more robust and flexible business process automation, and a breaking down of silos of content, ultimately leading to what I see as a new generation of content applications.

Does the new standard mean long-time competitors become long-term friends? More likely, the race is on to see who can build the most interesting and useful content-enabled applications embracing CMIS. It this race, however, it is likely customers will come out on top.

Ginny Bartosek reports from Open Text Content World in Orlando Florida

Another ARMA International has come and gone with huge success! The Open Text booth saw three times the traffic of last year and we were able to connect with close to 1,100 attendees. We heard a lot of buzz around email management, eDiscovery, and the management of SharePoint content. There was also a low rumbling around the concept of Web 2.0 and the effects for records management.

During the conference we introduced an expansion of our content lifecycle management (CLM) services for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, extending the solution to our eDOCS customers. CLM Services for SharePoint, eDOCS Edition by SeeUnity will provide eDOCS customers integrated records management and archiving capabilities to improve compliance initiatives in a market where growing regulatory demands and risk management are major concerns.

This year we also offered the "spin to win" activity where visitors were given the chance to spin the wheel to win a prize. It was lined up each day and drew great attention to the booth.

Our speaker at the event was EVP of Marketing Bill Forquer. Bill spoke with a number of industry analysts, press, fellow industry colleagues and practitioners. Here are some observations and threads of his conversations...

• Re-evaluations of business strategy and corresponding IT priorities triggered by economic uncertainty
• Information governance is moving up the priority list; it is the foundation for lots of benefits
• Increased blurring of records and eDiscovery processes; they are becoming more closely aligned
• Increased attention on retention and disposition, and not just with formal records programs
• Federated vs. centralized records strategies. The aspiration for federated is there; the legacy of centralized remains.
• "We don't have retention problems, we have disposition problems. We retain just fine."

This year's conference really adapted well to the Las Vegas theme. Each day we got to experience records mangers and information professionals doing either karaoke, dancing with the stars, or playing Guitar Hero. You could not walk through the exhibit hall without witnessing either Elvis or a Las Vegas show girl. Lots of fun was had, there was much to learn and many great conversations were shared. My hats are tipped to the organizers and we look forward to returning next year.

eDiscovery has been top of mind for organizations in multiple industries in the United States - spoliation, smoking guns, litigation, court fines and sanctions; eDiscovery costs, as well as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure amendments which stipulate that organizations must have defensible policies and practices in place for the management of electronically-stored information. On top of this, many organizations face numerous compliance regulations that require certain documents and emails to be retained for a specific retention periods.

Energy organizations are far from exempt from eDiscovery issues. In fact, research from Fulbright & Jaworski LLP on litigation trends found that Energy was the only industry in which more than half of the companies surveyed had regulatory proceedings initiated or filed against them in the past year. To make it more meaningful, Energy companies are operating in turbulent times as it relates to pricing, costs, geopolitical risk, etc. and they frequently engage in aggressive and risky exploration/capital project investments.

So what to do? Well first, you can listen to a podcast we recorded that features Rebecca Ptaszynski, an associate in the Commercial Litigation Group at Vedder Price, as well as Stephen Ludlow, program manager, eDiscovery for Open Text, and Hugh Ritchie, program manager for manufacturing and energy at Open Text. They provide some great information to get energy companies thinking about eDiscovery.

In the podcast, Stephen talks about some key things energy organizations need to do to be prepared for eDiscovery requests. They're outlined below:

1. Conduct a thorough risk assessment on your litigation readiness. Review your policies and capabilities for both information disposition and for the capability of putting content on litigation hold. Assess your records environment - what you have in place, what you are lacking, and the risks and vulnerabilities found within your records management procedures. If you were faced with litigation tomorrow, determine what risks you would face and what potential problems you would have in producing the information that is requested. Determine how ready your company is from a policy perspective to be able to respond promptly to litigation.

2. Develop an internal team of eDiscovery specialists. This team of specialists will help to ensure you have the capability of being able to respond to eDiscovery from an IT perspective, and from a legal perspective. Specialists will work with the content being collected and put on preservation hold, and help you understand the content, search through the content and eventually make the content available for legal review. Having a specialist in house provides the capability to reduce the amount of content that is handed over for legal review. They also help to ensure that the searches and the collection of content are done defensibly should you be challenged.

3. Look at each case separately. Organizations need to look at every case separately to determine how they will respond internally from an eDiscovery perspective. A risk assessment should be conducted on every case and determine if your current procedures are relevant. Keeping it in-house makes sense, but there are some cases where it is still a good idea to get a specialist in to do the eDiscovery work.

4. Implement an Enterprise Content Management Strategy. An Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system, containing solid records management policies, helps energy organizations understand the content they have within their organization. It allows them to put disposition policies on their information to get the sheer amount of information growing in their organization under control. An ECM system also enables organizations to broadly implement litigation holds on content so that when they are subject to litigation, they have the capabilities to put the content on hold and ensure that content does not get disposed of inadvertently during the case or prior to the case.

This week, Open Text will be at the ARMA International's 53rd Annual Conference and Expo in Las Vegas. "This world-renown event is where professionals go for real business solutions, best practices, technology tools and innovative ideas".

I look forward to having the opportunity to speak to records managers and information management professionals about their take on "everything 2.0". What are their thoughts on digital content preservation, how do we manage content that is either user generated or heavily socialized? Are these questions keeping them up at night?

With the digitization of our information I am starting to wonder; what content will be left behind as artifacts for the next generations? Is it safe to assume that content that we deem as important will be reproducible in 20 years time?

Digital content - unlike paper - cannot be stored safely away for others to view in years to come, or can it? Digital content is more complex in nature, as we are talking about 'content in action'. Also, we are no longer creating content as a 'party of one', we are socializing our content. We are creating our content using tools such as wikis, blogs and chat instances.

In my humble opinion, if we are doing this in an enterprise arena, than it should be constituted as a record. There is no question that the long standing and revered requirement to preserve and manage records is continuing to grow in magnitude as information becomes more pervasive and yet more fluid in the digital age. The question becomes how do we retain the contextual premise of the content? How do we classify it? These amongst many other are questions that I will save for the professionals to answer next week.

We'll be providing regular updates here @ ECM Briefs including the buzz from the show floor. Or follow my real-time updates on Twitter here, using the hashtag #ARMA2008. If you are attending the show, stop by booth #711 and say hello. We are there October 20th though to the 23rd.