I have been having a look at Alfresco’s new records management functionality that will be available in Alfresco v3.2. They are heading towards testing against the DoD 5015.2 (Department of Defense) specification in September. Having been involved in building products against specifications like DoD (U.S), TNA 1 and 2 (The National Archives, UK) and Moreq 1 and 2 (DLM Forum, Europe) I have every sympathy for their engineering at the moment. These specifications tend to be very deep and have large numbers of mandatory requirements. We have been eagerly awaiting this major move forward from the Alfresco engineering team, and as a result I have been watching the alfrescoeng Twitter for the last couple of months. No surprise that everything seems to be related to records management. I remember the first time I did the TNA test, back in 2000, which involved an all night coding sessions towards the end. Hopefully the Alfresco engineers are more on top of it than we were?

I have to say – it is certainly looking promising. First of all, I love the fact they have built the user interface in Share. This is going to allow us to ensure that we deliver an exact match against our client requirements, even when they are not in line with the DoD specification. DoD, along with all other records management specifications, should always be viewed in context – they are a toolbox of best practices that allows the client organisation to choose the specific functionality that will work for them.

More specifically, Alfresco have created an Alfresco Share Site that is heavily customised to create a records management site, rather than a collaboration site. This makes sense – indeed, we are taking a similar approach with a workflow management tool here at Ixxus to replace that ‘challenging’ command line style web client you get at the moment. Using Share to create custom applications based around your content repository is something I think we will see lots more of in the future.

I also like the fact that the Alfresco approach enables us to hide away records management from the average user. Adoption of records management has always been difficult, mostly due to the fact that most of the users don’t care. It is seen as something onerous they have to do that gets in the way of them doing their jobs. Alfresco now allows you to build a comprehensive classification scheme that contains your records management rules. Designed well this will ensure your users only need to make a minimal effort to create a record and then Alfresco rules, behaviours and actions will enforce your business rules for you.

We have been discussing records management certification with Alfresco for the past two years, and it is great to see them putting so much engineering resource into finally tackling this issue. Of course, it raises the question – why DoD and not Moreq2, as this is the latest European specification on the block? It is certainly an interesting debate, but I have to say I am not surprised. I was involved with the development side of Moreq2 as a representative for a major vendor. It was generally felt by the vendors that Moreq2 went way beyond the job of a records management functional specification; it prescribed how things should be done rather than just defining what should be done. The classic example of this problem was an imaginary vendor who built a records management product that pulled emails out of an email server directly, without requiring action from a user. To pass Moreq2 they would be required to build a client that worked in the users email client. This approach of designing the solution rather than specifying a solution actually stifles innovation rather than encourages it by prescribing how vendors develop their products. DoD is a mature specification and covers a lot of the functionality in the TNA and Moreq specs anyway. Also, in the UK Moreq2 has not been mandated as a requirement for the UK Government, unlike the old TNA specification. This allows UK Government to look at a greater range of products and choose a product with the functionality that they actually require, rather than being solely driven by compliance to a National Archives standard specification.

So good luck to the Alfresco guys taking it through the testing and I can’t wait to see the finished product.