I blogged recently on the challenges facing the IT world and the significant pressures facing the global information management and Governance (infogov) community. The pandemic did not slow down regulatory change or the amount of data requiring management, and many organizations are frantically scrambling to keep pace, with workers newly dispersed, and procedural and operational upheaval in all directions.

Worse still, the growth, and variety of organizational data continues to accelerate, while the regulatory pressures and requirements continue to mount.  While GDPR needs no introduction, those in Vermont, California, India, Brazil, Chile, New Zealand, Turkey and Australia are all facing new legal definitions that require careful data management. Even before the pandemic, 93% of governance professionals [1] experienced compliance challenges related to information governance.

As the article “A Perfect Information Management Storm” explained, “Records and information management became imperative during this time to ensure the most appropriate protocols were in place for data security. Without security to keep information private, and without an effective document management protocol, organisations risk cyber-breaches, lost records, broken customer or citizen trust, and non-compliance with regulations.”[2]

Today’s ECM is an approach, not just tech

We’ve previously discussed that today’s enterprise content management (ECM) technology needs to offer a multi-faceted solution embracing remote user access, efficient resolution of investigation, ingestion of data, end user experience and search results, and must allow for a wide variety of analyses to ensure categorization of information can be made at the record, or element level, regardless of data source. And, of course, all aspects of operation, from the point of access to the data elements in question must conform to tight internal and external security controls and regulations.

However, it is more than that. We know the data sources and typical operational normalities are changing every year. A 2021 article [3] outlined today’s requirements of a viable ECM solution –

"ECM today is an approach, not a single technology. It may not even be possible to acquire all the necessary technologies from a single vendor. A suite of ECM technologies includes:

• Content services for transactional content
• Collaborative workspaces for people to work together
• Archival systems for old content
• Federated records management to manage records across the enterprise systems.”

These sentiments align closely with the Micro Focus Information Management and Governance solution blueprint. Market need has evolved to the point where a variety of integrated technologies may form the basis of an overall, enterprise-scale solution.

Securing and Managing Critical Content in 2021

As part of our ongoing innovation in this area, Micro Focus is delighted to announce Content Manager 10. The new release is part of our ongoing commitment in the Micro Focus IM&G team towards supporting customers to get the most from their data and employees. Our mantra, “Insight Empowered”, is about smart teams deriving smarter insights from their data.

Introducing Content Manager 10

Featuring intuitive querying, flexible user types and an enriched user experience, Content Manager 10 contains over 300 customer-suggested enhancements to offer our best ever support for today’s most challenging content management and compliance-related activities. Micro Focus Content Manager 10 seeks to address many of today’s increasingly important content management use cases to drive further efficiency and power into our customers’ hands.

Performance and Precision

We pride ourselves on offering a solution that helps users get to their answers quickly and improve efficiency. Our Elastic Search capabilities have been enhanced to support search result ordering by relevance and ranking, while indexing can now happen by file size to enable teams to prioritize (and segment) their indexing tasks. Meanwhile the latest release enables the automation of further tasks for greater efficiency, including updates to our powerful Automatic classification facility, and advanced disposal processing of lightweight records, to streamline content administration effort.

Enhanced Experience

Our latest UI innovations in Content Manager’s zero-footprint web client provide even greater levels of productivity for advanced and regular users alike. Based on overwhelming feedback from the 9.4 preview, our UX team has further enhanced the web client with an enriched, “document-centric” Explorer Window. It offers greater configurability, faster access to key functions, and supports more precise search definitions. Meantime, the Desktop Client has undergone a range of improvements across display, configuration and search functions.

Figure 1 – The new document-centric web-based desktop explorer window in Content Manager 10

Figure 2 - Fully configurable web-based explorer in CM10

M365 Collaboration and Integration 

Content needs managing across various domains and data types, of course, with a continued trend to monitor, manage and share information from Office 365 and related Microsoft systems. This release continues our innovation in this area, offering tight integration points between Content Manager and Microsoft OneDrive to support multi-user collaboration. It also features new Office Online (Microsoft 365) integration, further SharePoint integration improvements and refinement for Office/Outlook integration.

Figure 3 - OneDrive collaboration support in Content Manager 10

Figure 4 - Direct Integration between Content Manager and Office/Microsoft 365

Flexibly Yours

Content Manager proudly sits at the heart of a wide range of third party tools that provide a range of content management capabilities to markets worldwide. Part of the reason for that is the enhanced APIs and interfacing options, enabling administrative tasks to run behind the scenes for the users. We have further updated those administrative and super user capabilities available from the SDK (via the product’s ServiceAPI), including an enhanced “aggregate” function.

Speaking of flexibility, Micro Focus Content Manager is available either as a standard, perpetual license model, or also as a subscription model via the Content Manager Select product.

Learn More

For more details regarding Content Manager 10, catch-up with the recent preview session on our IM&G Brighttalk channel, and if you haven’t booked a place yet, be sure to register for Micro Focus Universe where we’ll be covering the latest news for Content Manager users, including further information on the new release.

Also, take a look at the support assets available with this release:

• Brand new IM&G “Insight Empowered” ebook
• The Content Manager Advantage brochure
• CM10 What’s New
• Content Manager brochure

Know your data | empower your people | drive your future

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[1] The Cost of Information Governance Non-Compliance | Resource | Compliance Week

[2] Why organisations are facing a perfect information management storm (securitybrief.com.au)

[3] What is the future of ECM? (techtarget.com)