The Zia and Alfresco teams recently ventured to Las Vegas to exhibit at the ARMA International Conference and Expo at the Venetian Congress Center. ARMA International is considered the authoritative body on information governance and a strong resource when it comes to managing your organization’s information. ARMA is a non-profit association with more than 27,000 members worldwide.
The event was well attended and booth traffic was steady. Our messaging centered on “simple records management” and our Easy RM solution using Alfresco Records Management 2.1. Records managers were compelled by the idea of taking the hard work associated with declaring a user and moving it to the background. They liked the notion of “in-place RM” and requested demo after demo after demo at our booth. Attendees were also quite interested in our email and mobile integrations with Alfresco RM. To learn more about these solutions, view our recent webinar recording.
Zia’s use of behaviors and rules does a lot of the heavy lifting for classifying documents and putting them under data governance as appropriate (based on user, action performed, and location in the repository)–this was really exciting to users. They also liked the new look and feel of Alfresco 4.2 and the RM module. The ability to create retention policies themselves after some training or with a system integrator was very well received by demo viewers.
One notion several of our team members took from the event is that cloud silos are coming. Attendees acknowledged the “Dropbox problem” quite strongly… and these were all of the people associated with governance in their organization. Therefore, they were appropriately worried about the risk to their organization of unmanaged, unstructured data sitting in cloud silos. Additionally, compliance and audit risks are growing–companies ignore it because it is too hard to deal with–but this is an issue that needs to be addressed. We believe migrating from existing RM solutions (or lack their of) to Alfresco is the answer to these concerns.
Overall, we enjoyed our time in Las Vegas at the ARMA event and look forward to continuing conversations with records management professionals.