Like every good (and bad) revolution before it, the Email revolution is fading. Not that we won’t be using email anymore… just the opposite. Email has become so routine and essential to our daily lives and business that it is no longer revolutionary. It’s ordinary.

Just a decade ago, when I wanted to send a written message I typed away in my handy fax template before making the rounds past the printer and then fax machine. I don’t even know where the office fax machine is located anymore. Now, its seems everything is done via email. Even the friendly phone doesn’t ring as much (and I hope I don’t lose it too).

This shift to email hasn’t been unnoticed by the legal and regulatory folks either, those honest blokes who battle for and against us in the halls of justice and create regulations with official sounding names like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, SEC, FINRA, FRCP (and I’m sure their are dozens more).

Which brings us to the point of all this. Email is now by-and-large considered as likely to be a corporate “record” as any other form of written word. As records managers know, a “record” is defined by content and purpose, not file type. So, it doesn’t matter if you don’t save it, if you delete it, or if you just pretend it never happened… if an email was sent to you or you sent it to someone else, it could be considered by someone as a “record”. For more on this topic, check out our page on records management.

A quick trip over to our engineering group today (the smart side of the office) gave me a heads-up on a neat new technology being worked on for an upcoming Document Locator release. It’s not fully baked yet – it doesn’t even have a name… so there’s no chance of getting more details from our crew in the front-office. But, here’s some inside details for all the fellow Document Locator followers out there: The new feature will allow you to, really easily, and really quickly, save-off files from your managed repositories and share them in an organized way with non-Document Locator users. Useful things like ‘project close-out’ and ‘customer or vendor hand-off’ come to mind, so stay tuned for more details… And if you’re a Document Locator customer, be on the lookout for a new version release later this spring!

I was at a conference the other day and ran into a dutiful young lady (I’ll call her “Jill”) who, at the direction of her well-intentioned boss, had taken the initiative to make her office “paperless”. She scanned every piece of paper from every file cabinet, and voila… nobody could find a single document they were looking for.

The reason: going paperless takes more than just a scanner and a desire to digitize carbon.

Any attempt to go paperless without properly indexing the content of documents, and having a tool to search, categorize, and organize the resulting digital files, is the electronic equivalent of tossing the contents of your old metal filing cabinets up in the air – you won’t find a thing.

Jill found out the hard way that scanning documents and storing them in folders leads to disaster. Good for her, I was able to point her in the right direction for a document management system.

We renewed our Microsoft partnership the other day (which is no small task, I can assure you, but a very meaningful and important one for us). BIG thanks are due our customers (you know who you are) who helped us out in this process. It’s great knowing we have customers who care about us so much that you are willing to spend your time and effort in our cause – and it’s much appreciated. Thank You!

This was a milestone year for us… our fifth year in a row being Microsoft “Gold Certified” partner, which is the elite of the elite in the Microsoft neighborhood. It’s only fitting, since we are a Microsoft-shop, and we like to think we are their best partner when it comes to document management for windows.