In the wake of the release of HP TRIM 7 last month, a lot of folks are talking. They are talking about its features, discussing integration options, musing over deployment costs… The strange thing is they’re not talking about TRIM. Instead, they’re talking about SharePoint.
A large amount of the launch hype for TRIM 7 ended up directed at something that HP calls “Transparent Records Management“. Sounds catchy right? (To give credit where it’s due, Pie raised this concept long before I heard anyone at HP use it.) And in the case of HP TRIM 7, it is all done through Microsoft SharePoint. Effectively, this is Records Management by stealth. Users keep on using SharePoint and under the covers, everything gets magically sucked into TRIM and nobody ever has to see, learn or care.
The way I see it, what has happened here is inevitable. TRIM was originally built for managing records. As such, it developed a lot of tools that Records Managers needed to meet their compliance requirements. These Records Managers would then have to plead with their Information Technology departments to help install them, and configure them. And it was here, right in the cultural divide between RM and IT that “Transparent Records Management” was born. IT guys are generally hard to impress and TRIM didn’t exactly blow them away. Look at the posts all over the internet of administrators complaining . Additionally, TRIMs “Best Practice” approach to RM – (effectively a whole of life cycle records management approach including users filing their information at the time of creation) came with large training overheads and burdened users to classify the content that they created. From its inception TRIM played to the RM crowd. This move to SharePoint marks their new change in focus – to cozy up to the IT guys.
The RM market is, in the grand scheme of things, reasonably small. It’s conservatively estimated by Gartner at somewhere between 400 and 500 million dollars (USD). The SharePoint market on the other hand is estimated to be over 2.8 billion . Financially, it makes more sense for HP to reduce the functionality of their product in order to address a mass market, than it does to maintain any kind of “Best Practice” approach that only appeals to a small niche market. I’m sure HP didn’t buy TOWER just to make the world’s Records Managers happy.
But it is important to note that if you are using TRIM and SharePoint for “Transparent Records Management”, you are not managing your information as well as you could. A functional Business Classification System designed specifically for your organization is simply not going to mesh very well with the project based structure of a Microsoft SharePoint deployment, no matter how much poking and prodding you do. This transparency comes at a price, and that price is inaccuracy.
Also note that the dumbing down of TRIM isn’t exclusive. TRIM 7 can absolutely be used without SharePoint, and it looks like it may well be the best iteration of the product yet. But the fact that all the talk and marketing noise from Paolo Alto has moved towards SharePoint seems indicative of the new direction that HP are taking the product – one that values part of a large market over all of a small one, profit over best practice, and perhaps for the first time, IT over RM.
