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INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Things are happening fast at
enterprise information management
company M-Files Corporation.
Having opened a UK office in
Reading, Berkshire earlier this
year, the Finnish company has just
announced a new version of its
flagship software.
M-Files 2015.1 reinforces the
company’s focus on metadata for
improved document and information
management and features a
number of enhancements to boost
efficiency and accuracy. These
include the ability to add contextual
automatic values and intuitive
property groupings to the metadata
of documents; easier sharing
of content across PCs, tablets
and smartphones; faster full-text
searches; and greater flexibility in
configuring approval rules, electronic
signatures and processes.
In an interview with sister
publication
PrintIT Reseller
, M-Files
director of UK Business Development
Julian Cook said that the company’s
metadata-based approach, which
prioritises what a document is rather
than where it is stored, is proving
popular with customers who are
becoming increasingly dissatisfied
with the limitations of a folder-based
approach to storage and retrieval.
“For a simple illustration of why
the traditional way of managing
information using folders doesn’t
work, think of a sales person putting
together a proposal for a customer.
The first thing they have to think
about is where to put the proposal.
Worst case scenario is they keep it
locally on their laptop, but even if
they’ve got some kind of network
storage they will think ‘This proposal
relates to a customer, so do I put it
in the customer folder? Or, because
it relates to a particular product, do I
put it in the product line folder? Or do
I put it in my territory folder?’’. Before
long, they start asking themselves ‘Do
I put multiple copies of this document
in different folders on the network or
do I put it in one folder and hope that
everyone thinks the same way as me
and is able to find it?”
He added: “Putting documents
into specific folders and sub-folders
really does lead to confusion
and very quickly you end up with
multiple versions of the document
spread across different parts of the
organisation.”
The M-Files approach is to
assign metadata – properties or
attributes – to a document or piece
of information. Rather than putting
the sales proposal in a folder, M-Files
users tag it with the customer name,
the product line, the territory, the
sales team and so on. This contextual
information enables people to
search for documents based on their
attributes, dramatically improving the
ease with which information can be
found and shared.
Dynamic views
Cook says documents can be
retrieved in two ways – by entering
keywords into a search engine, with
returns ranked in order of relevance,
or by creating what he calls ‘dynamic
views’.
“If I go into M-Files, I might want
to look at all invoices or proposals.
I could set up a dynamic view so
that those are the only documents I
see in that view. If I am in a finance
department I might want to look at
invoices that are due this month
or that are due this quarter or that
belong to a particular supplier. I might
find the same document using these
different dynamic views. It is very
comfortable for me as an end user: I
am using something that looks, smells
and feels like a folder, but actually a
document can exist in one or multiple
dynamic views based on the metadata
of the document,” he said.
Cook adds that metadata also
drives how information is managed.
“Metadata attributes added to an
information asset can automatically
kick off certain workflows. For
example, if I save or create an
invoice, its metadata attributes can
automatically indicate that this,
this and this person need to review
it. Or, from an access and security
standpoint, metadata attributes
might dictate that only this, this
and this person can view it and
only this person can edit it. Or, from
a replication standpoint, it might
determine that after five years the
invoice is automatically saved to a
specific archive vault,” he said.
According to Cook, metadata also
serves as the bridge connecting
structured content – information
assets residing within a database
e.g. a CRM, ERP or accounting
system – with unstructured content,
such as Word and Excel files, images,
video and email files.
“If I am a sales person and I’m
working on a proposal associated
with a customer contact in the CRM
system, metadata connects the
CRM system to the unstructured
repository involved, which is M-Files,
so that that proposal can reveal
itself within the CRM system. By
associating the proposal with the
customer account, I can see that
there are three or four open support
tickets that need to be resolved and
that the customer has two or three
outstanding invoices. The metadata
serves as an intelligence layer that
connects systems and gives people
content in context – a 360 degree
view of all the other content assets
and processes associated with the
singular asset that I am looking for.
That is something that makes us
distinctive from other players in our
field,” he explained.
Fast growing
M-Files has been successful at
selling this approach to mid-market
companies, outgrowing the market
by a factor of ten last year, with
revenue growth of 75% compared
to 8-10% for the enterprise content
management market as a whole,
according to Gartner’s estimate.
Cook is confident that M-Files
will continue to expand as more
companies become frustrated with
conventional document management
solutions.
“I am pleasantly surprised by how
much opportunity there is, by how
many businesses of pretty significant
size don’t have any type of document
or content management solution
in place and are still managing
mountains of paper. Many companies
have network drives, folders and
sub-folders, but everyone I speak
to realises that this is not a viable
solution for managing documents or
their content going forward,” he said.
Frustration with document storage based on
folders and sub-folders is driving growing
demand for metadata-based content
management
The problem
with folders
Julian Cook
director of
UK Business
Development,
M-Files
