The missing link
- Article 10 of 26
- M-iD, November 2004
Could a new 'linked in place' approach to records management systems tackle the issue of managing records stored in multiple systems?
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Equally, Barron says his company's DB2 Record Manager software is a piece of middleware that stands alone from its ECM system. If customers choose to keep data in existing repositories, they can add records management capabilities to the necessary applications through Record Manager's APIs or its out-of-the-box integration tools; if the repositories do not have the necessary capabilities for records management, customers can migrate the data to an ECM. It is, therefore, up to the customer to decide just how many applications they want to records-enable.
“There are lots of applications out there that people need to records-enable: transactional applications and so on. There's some effort required but nothing too significant. The US Patents and Trademarks office embedded our engine in 75 custom applications, and ours was the only product that was able to records-enable them, because it's an embeddable engine,” says Barron.
Whether it will be possible to have the full 'linked in place' architecture envisaged by Forrester's Markham and how encompassing that architecture can be will depend on whether organisations employ applications that are capable of records management or of responding to records management applications.
At the moment, there is little likelihood of this situation changing: legacy applications will present the same problems as before; and repositories and applications that do not have the APIs necessary to integrate with records management systems are unlikely to acquire them in the future. The industry's attempt to create a standard API for opening up repositories, the Java-based JSR170, has received some backing but it is still in its infancy and offers only a small set of the features necessary for records management.
'Linked in place', rather than becoming the next obvious phase in records management architecture, is likely to become a choice for organisations with the right sets of applications, the right records management system and the money to integrate them. For everyone else, painful migrations and implementations limited to only a few systems are the only way to join this elite.
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