With version 10 of Content Manager due out in the second half of 2020, Micro Focus has announced a new subscription pricing model for the ECM platform popular at all levels of Government in Australia.

In a webinar to announce the product roadmap for 2020 and beyond, WW Senior Director, Secure Content Management Solutions for Micro Focus David Gould noted that almost half of customers worldwide for Content Manager are in Australia.

Gould said government users have been asking for a new subscription pricing model for some time. They will now be able to move from a perpetual licensing payment with an annual support payment to an annual subscription license.

Microfocus is also simplifying the number and variety of license types to reduce these to just three: one for an administrator/power user, one for a knowledge worker and a free read only license for simply providing access to records.

Support for Office365 will be a major feature addition for Content Manager 10 due out later in 2020. This will allow a standardise Office UI integration across desktop and online editions and use of OneDrive for collaboration.

Improved Elastic Search integration will include Index Scheme improvements and performance improvements for Document Content extraction.

Further along in 2021 Micro Focus intends to add capabilities for File Analysis of Content Manager data to identify sensitive data, content for classification and candidates for disposition.

Future editions will also introduce enhanced disposition capabilities with privacy-centric and business-centric workflows.

“Privacy initiatives have exploded across the world,” said Gould, “with new regulations introduced in Europe, California, South Africa, Turkey, Canada and many more on the way. After the introduction in California now 36 of other 52 US states moving privacy legislation through.

“As the premier records management solution in the world, Content Manager can provide a critical element in solving issues around privacy management.

“Deletion and retention are two of the most important data management issues today.

“Retention is massively important in GDPR, as is forced deletion of content at end of phase. Content Manager can handle FOI requests so it can manage privacy, data retention and successfully delete content.

“Unfortunately, many organisations aren’t turning to their records people to manage privacy,” said Gould.

The ever-growing patchwork of global privacy legislation.