Fascinating posting and comments, I missed Koral at the Office 2.0 Conference, I must have been in another excellent session. Having taken a look it appears that Koral is offering what is often encompassed by the newest content management acronym — Basic Content Services (BCS, not to be confused in this space with Business Classification Schema), a term which now seems to be commonly applied to Microsoft’s MOSS 2007. Either way, neither Koral nor MOSS are ECM — well not by AIIM’s definition anyway.

However my contention is that ECM is a strategy, not a system. As noted by many posters, users don’t like DM / DRM / ECM systems when they have to contend with confusing web interfaces, the requirements for lots of metadata, records management retention periods, etc. So it’s about the business, and sometimes individual end users have to bite the bullet and do things that bring benefit to the organization, even if it means they have to spend a few minutes meta-tagging their documents. However, we absolutely should make it as easy and as usable as possible — and I can tell you Documentum, Livelink et al. need to apply to their ECM systems interfaces the creativity apparent in many of the products that have been presented at the Office 2.0 Conference.

Wow! Can’t wait.

-Ryan

Message received and understood. Inbound email is in the works at the moment, and—fingers crossed—we’ll get working on the Zoho integration soon.

Regards
-Tim Barker
VP Product, Koral

I agree, integration with ThinkFree and Zoho would be great!

Best regards
 -Ismael

Thanks a lot for the background information. Fascinating!

-Ismael

I don’t recall the name of the software vendor anymore, and I believe that it no longer exists. The package was purchased by TGH back in the earlier 80’s, which ran on Prime computer (another extinct species). The purchase of that package and money spent to beef up security were the joke within the hospital circle in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area). It was the third attempt by TGH to get a suite of Patient Registration & A/D/T systems up and running. The first attempt took place right at the same time when I delivered a turnkey suite of Patient Registraton & A/D/T to McMater University Medical Centre (MUMC) at Hamilton, Ontario. TGH hired IBM Canada to deliver the suite. After 3 million dollars and 2 years, IBM only delivered a partial Patient Registration System, running on an IBM mainframe, with very limited capabilities. When it was up and running, the CEO of TGH called my boss, the President of the consulting firm for which I worked, to enquire how the McMaster project was going. My boss told her that the Patient Registration & A/D/T was and running more than 18 months ago. Anyway, TGH could easily get money to waste, as it was the largest teaching and research hospital in Canada!

In terms of security, MUMC has confidential admission for the members of Royal families in the U.K. or Middle East, or well-known dignitaries. In pre-admission or admission, the name of a confidential admitted patient never shows up on any terminal, unless you are a member of that patient’s treatment team, with proper security clearance. After a confidentially admitted patient is discharged, only designated senior medical clerks can do medical asbstracts of medical records for that patient. Moreover, the names of confidentially admitted patients never show up on regular daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly reports. Another set of confidential reports would track the movements of those confidentially admitted patients.

ECM would be an important system for organizations like hospitals — teaching hospitals in particular. Organization and retrieval of medical records for treating a patient or doing a piece of research work would require high degrees of relevancy, accuracy, and security to protect privacy and confidentiality. In essence, Basic Content Management is for the general masses, while certified ECM is for organizations that require extensive security capabilities.

Cheers!
 -Francis

I’d love to know who the vendor was…

-Ismael

Thanks for the URL of Gartner’s article. I agree with you that Koral is just a basic content management service, not truly ECM. ECM must be able to tag the security level of a document, which would be accessible only by people with proper security clearances. For instance, in-patient medical records are only accessible by the medical team that looks after the patient, not everyone in the hospital. The Toronto General Hospital (TGH) bought a package from a software vendor headquartered California. It was designed by a medical doctor, but TGH spent 4 million dollars to retrofit security features in the package. The package exposed every patient’s medical records to everyone who had accesss to the package! I believe that no hospitals would sign up to Koral’s services anytime soon.

Thanks again.

-Francis

It sounds like the real market that Koral is going after is the Basic Content Services market, not the Enterprise Content Management Market. There is a writeup on BCS at Gartner.

-Joe

I couldn’t agree with you more that for personal use, any content management would do. When it comes to the enterprise, it is a very different story. I recall back in the early 80’s, I was in a consulting assignment with a petroleum company in Canada. One day, I was working in a VP’s office, and fully clothed RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) officers came into the office and cleaned out all documents from the VP’s filing cabinets. Later I found out that the tax return officer at Revenue Canada who checked the companie’s tax filing didn’t like the filing, and ordered a forensic audit of the oil company’s business transactions. It was not just that VP though, and documents were taken from the filing cabinets of the President, VPs, and Directors of the company. Two years later, there was no charge laid against the company, and all documents were returned. My point is that when you use the term enterprise, it means that you are subject to complying with regulations, be it SOX or equivalent!

Reasons that end users do not like ECM could be many. Personally, if the ECM does not index and categorize documents properly, I would not use it, just as simple as that. Moreover, if the online help is worse than the printed user manual, this would turn off users entirely. I learned this from a consulting assignment back in 1979 when I delivered a suite of turnkey Patient Registration and A/D/T systems to a teaching hospital. These systems were used by many departments, but the Patient Information Services Department was the primary user. As required by the Director of Patient Information Services, a system must be idiot proof, and she was right. Before a piece of data was updated in the MUMPS database, it was thoroughly validated. If a user did not know what the data field was used for and its valid set of values, s/he entered a question mark in the data field, and the system would respond with a comprehensive set of instructions on what to do on the right hand side of the screen of a VT100 terminal. Users did not need to consult a paper based user manual. I prepared one, but the Director of Patient Information Services never released it! She filed it in one of her drawers in her desk. By the way, the intructions were primarily written by the senior admitting clerks of the Patient Information Services.

In essence, when a software is truly an ECM, it must support regulatory compliance and security requirements. In general, software vendors, including IBM, are very good at overhyping their products’ capabilities, but fall short in delivering them. Sometimes, these are vaporware, as an Executive VP, Engineering of a cellphone services provider called it. Many practitioners in the IT industry misuse terms all the time, as I pointed out in this article about a year ago.

Cheers!
 -Francis

I’m sure that docHarbor is a good company. But there are many ECM companies that have large feature sets including Documentum, FileNet, OpenText, Hummingbird, and Stellant, just to name a few.

We’re not trying to match all of these players feature for feature — that would be a waste of energy, and they would do a better job. We’re trying to address a much broader market need, and one that is not tied to just sales & marketing. The ECM space is worth $3 billion a year, and yet only 5% of all business users use any content management system at all. We believe that this is because today’s systems are not solving the problems of the end user in a simple enough way that leads end users to truly be productive. It is true that with docHarbor you can manage Sarbanes Oxley, and with Documentum you can manage the new drug submission process in the Pharmaceutical sector, and if you have those needs you should talk with these companies.

But for the rest of us that want a simpler experience with managing content, I believe that solutions like Koral (and others) will fill this market gap in the way that Salesforce.com filled a market gap not met by the overly complex Siebel offering.