HP held its Information Governance Forum 2015 across Australian capital cities over the past two weeks. When a presenter referred to the Records Manager product by its previous name TRIM, he joked “I wish I had a dollar every time I did that. “ If there was someone willing to cough up a gold coin each time a speaker through the day-long event made the same mistake he/she would have been much poorer by the end of the day, as it was a routine slipup, understandable given TRIM’s deep roots in the Australian market.

In fact former TOWER Software employee Michelle Phillips, now HP’s Global Product Marketing Manager for the RM product, confessed to a feeling of pride that the product initially developed in Australia in 1985 had survived a “long winding and rocky road over the past few years.”

Following the 2011 buyout of Autonomy the company essentially had four EDRMS product lines targeting the same market, TRIM, Autonomy Records Manager, Meridio and iManage WorkSite.

“This gave a lot of ammunition to our competitors so it’s pleasing that TOWER’s legacy has survived to emerge as the last man standing with Records Manager continuing on from the TRIM code base,” said Phillips.

ARM and Meridio users are required to undertake migrations to the RM product while Worksite, referred to as a “niche product for the legal market” has exited the stage following a management buyout.

HP claims approximately 1.85 million users for TRIM/Records Manager worldwide with uptake quickening in the US marketplace

Phillips discussed an increased pace for new releases of Records Manager over the coming years, with an expected 3 per 12 month period. While another presenter suggested that patches, which in the past often meant a re-install, will now use an industry standard and reversible method of updates and patches.

Highlights of the current RM 8.2 release include enhanced functionality for the Web client which is expected to eventually become the only required interface, and integration with Office365 and SharePoint online.

A new Outlook 2013 add-on provides RM access directly via the email client.

Email Subject Parsing is a new feature to assist auto classifying email into RM, particularly for government users using their security level annotation.

Integration with the ONeill Bridge software is a new feature that allows retrieval of physical records from offline storage providers such as Grace with a single mouse click, while the RM 8.2 interface has been enhanced to appear more like the Microsoft Office ribbon. There is also a degree of customisation able to be provided. One improvement provided with the deployment of IDOL 10.10 is a status window that shows what is happening while reindexing of records is being undertaken.

HP also demonstrated RM 8.2’s ability to govern content in Office 365 including OneDrive for business, without the requirement for users to make any records management decisions.

Administrators are now able to configure access for new users not currently registered as a Location in Records Manager.

The ability for organisations to tackle the “Dark Data” living in fileshares, SharePoint and legacy and redundant applications was emphasised in a presentation featuring HP’s ControlPoint and Structured Data Manager products.

Erwin Zweers, a technical specialist at HP Big Data Solutions, said Australia is leading the way with deployment of ControlPoint as a means of automating the process of discovering unmanaged information and transferring it into HP RM

He cited the example of one Victorian government department that was able to identify 20% of data as Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial (ROT) following ControlPoint analysis. Based on analyst estimates that it costs $25 (USD) per Gigabyte per annum to manage (ESG Labs Whitepaper commissioned by HP), deleting 2.5 TB from a 10TB data pool represents potential annual savings of around $A84,000.  

The latest version of ControlPoint V 4.6 moves to keeping metadata in SQLserver which promises faster and cheaper storage.

Structured Data Manager provides the ability to retire records from legacy applications to a file based archive or Records manager with access to the data via ODBC reporting tools. It can also enhance enterprise application performance by extracting and archiving redundant or outdated data from LOB databases.