New capabilities added to Alfresco Governance Services
The updates are intended to secure electronically stored information residing across different locations in light of recent regulatory changes, including the GDPR, FOIA and CCPA.
Alfresco Software introduced new information governance capabilities this week to its Digital Business Platform through updates to Alfresco Governance Services.
The updates include new desktop synchronization, federation services and AI-assisted legal holds features.
"In the coming year, we expect many organizations to be hit with large fines as a result of not meeting regulatory standards for data privacy, e.g., the European GDPR and California's CCPA. We introduced these capabilities to help our customers guarantee their content security and circumvent those fines," said Tara Combs, information governance specialist at Alfresco.
Federation Services enables cross-databases search
Federation Services is a new addition to Alfresco Governance Services. Users can search, view and manage content from Alfresco and other repositories, such as network file shares, OpenText, Documentum, Microsoft SharePoint, Dropbox.
Users can also search across different databases with the application without having to migrate content. Federation Services provides one user interface for users to manage all the information resources in an organization, according to the company.
Organizations can also store content in locations outside of Alfresco platform.
Legal holds feature provides AI-assisted search for legal teams
The legal holds feature provides document search and management capabilities that help legal teams identify relevant content for litigation purposes. Alfresco's tool now uses AI to discover relevant content and metadata, according to the company.
"AI is offered in some legal discovery software systems, and over time all these specialized vendors will leverage AI and machine learning," said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis. He added that the AI-powered feature of Alfresco Governance Services is one of the first such offerings from a more general information management vendor.
"It is positioned to augment the specialized vendors' work, essentially curating and capturing relevant bodies of information for deeper analysis."
Desktop synchronization maintains record management policies
Another new feature added to Alfresco Governance Services synchronizes content between a repository and a desktop, along with the records management policies associated with that content, according to the company.
With the desktop synchronization feature, users can expect to have the same record management policies when they access a document on their desktop computer or viewing it from the source repository, according to the company.
When evaluating a product like this in the market, Pelz-Sharpe said the most important feature a buyer should look for is usability. "AI is very powerful, but less than useless in the wrong hands. Many AI tools expect too much of the customer -- usability and recognizable, preconfigured features that the customer can use with little to no training are essential."
The new updates are available as of Dec. 3. There is no price difference between the updated version of Alfresco Governance Services and the previous version. Customers who already had a subscription can upgrade as part of their subscription, according to the company.
According to Pelz-Sharpe, Alfresco has traditionally competed against enterprise content management and business process management vendors. It has pivoted during recent years to compete more directly with PaaS competitors, offering a content- and process-centric platform upon which its customer can build their own applications. In the future, the company is likely to compete against the likes of Oracle and IBM, he said.
