Attended two conferences this week, both of which had some very interesting content. The first was the AIIM Conference where the main topic was centered around the use of SharePoint for information managment. The second, the Social Networking for Business (SNFB) discussed the use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites for getting out the word on your business. I will discuss the AIIM conference here and the SNFB conference in a later blog.
It was pointed out that the information generated today is exceeding 5 Exabytes a year. For those who don’t recognize this number it is a Millon Gigabytes of data. Suffice it to say that this amounts to a huge problem in trying to store this information in some form of retrievable format and then indexing and filtering it so that you can find the specific piece of information that you want in that datastore.
I am reminded of an Arlo and Janis cartoon where they are looking at their kid doing his homework, using the computer, and remarking that he had it easy since they had to go to the library and do a much more physical lookup of information. And the kid is looking at the screen thinking Abraham Lincoln 10,209,100 hits. He has to filter through all of that to find the info he needs for his report.
In addition, much of the information above either starts as paper or ends up as paper, so we have a physical storage problem as well.
Document managment programs have been around for a long time and have done much for us being able to retrieve information from the “stacks”. Prior to our current web abilites we had companies like Lexus and Nexus, and custom products built for librarying and retrieving information from the large volume of the time (which by todays standards is trival – something in the low Gigabyte range) that even though they were expensive and clumsy did allow for the retrieval of information. Companies like Filenet and Documentum have been working with cataloging large quantities of information since the 90′s, but were also expensive and complex to set up.
Sharepoint has become an entry point for the SMB (small to medium size business) market to looking at implmenting information managment systems in companies that would not have considered it previously. Several companies are now putting out software that will scan and manage documents directly interfacing with Sharepoint. Additional tools are being supplied that help with indexing and retrieval that plug into the Sharepoint UI.
Since this topic is one that covers a lot of ground I intend to make it a regular topic area on the blog and will be adding information about this on a regular basis.