It's time to move beyond your on-premises EDRMS

You have an on-premises electronic document and records management system (EDRMS) and have supported it for years. The system was great in the beginning, as it did everything you needed it to, supporting the goal of managing your company’s official records using best practices.

But technology is shifting, and the amount of data within your organization has grown exponentially, with new data sources – often unstructured data – being adopted by teams at an accelerated rate. The resulting data sprawl is becoming harder to manage in an on-premises system.  

It’s overwhelming. You’re invested, but you’re likely facing problems that may include increasing support costs; end of life for your EDRMS version resulting in expensive upgrade projects; or your software has been sunsetted and is soon-to-be a legacy system.  

This is not to mention your end users' complaints about having to be Records Managers at their desktop, wondering why they can’t just leave their information in other content sources like SharePoint or SAP. And do you want end users to manage this explosion of electronic data? You can’t be sure it’s properly classified, added to the EDRMS at all, includes the full picture of a record, or includes all appropriate metadata. Your users find interacting with the EDRMS to be intrusive, time-consuming, and oftentimes just confusing.

How do you resolve the issues caused by an outdated EDRMS?

When you have a system filled with rich content that needs to be managed long-term, your options for resolving this issue are:

1. Do nothing and hope the problem solves itself
2. Manage in-place, meaning leave it where it is and have another solution manage it along with any other identified content sources.
3. Migrate only high-value content data to another platform
4. Migrate everything to another platform  

Each one of these choices has pros and cons. Let’s go into each one.

Do nothing

This is likely the option you are currently employing. But ignoring the problem will not make it go away, you will eventually have to face the impending obsoletion of your system.

Manage in-place

Managing your existing data in-place, leveraging a solution such as RecordPoint with its Connector framework allows you to manage your legacy data alongside other structured and unstructured data sources. It’s likely your team uses other data sources to complete tasks as part of their roles, so selecting this option brings consistency to your data management, whether the data is in a modern SaaS like Salesforce or a legacy EDRMS.

This solution may work for you in the short term, as a transitional solution. But challenges may emerge if your legacy EDRMS becomes unsupported on newer operating systems as providers, such as Microsoft, regularly update their platforms. If this is on the horizon, a migration of the data to another platform must happen at some point.

Migrate high-value content

Migrating only high-value content allows you to reduce the volume of data you migrate but requires you to understand a) what data you have, and b) what your definition of “high-value” is, for each given data type.  

Each organization will have a slightly different definition of high-value data, but it may include categories like PII (Personally Identifiable Information), PCI (Payment Card Information), PHI (Protected Health Information). Some organizations may consider data “high-value” when it has a longer-term retention plan, is deemed to have archival value, or contains vital records required to keep a business operational. Many organizations will have this identified through such documents as Business Continuity Plans.  

Once you have examined your content and identified that high-value information you can then look to migrate it to the new system. This all requires time and expertise, as well as some level of automation, to manage the data at scale. To learn more about migrating legacy data, read our article on the subject.

Migrate everything

Migrating everything may seem like a better choice as it will allow you to avoid the challenge of identifying high-value content and ensure you won’t leave anything behind. But this choice will likely still require a lot of effort.  

In some cases, metadata from the old platform will not be supported on the new platform, so some level of transformation will need to be done. If this is the case, it would likely make more sense to focus on migrating high-value content instead: if transformation is required, better to do it to only the data that matters to your business.

How can we help?

Thanks to the Data Trust Platform, you can migrate with confidence, ensuring ROT (Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial data) is removed and data is categorized.

Until you’re ready to migrate, you can manage your content in-place, using our Connector framework to manage it from a central location, alongside records from other data sources your organization uses. Managing content in this way will bring consistency to your data management, no matter where the data is housed, helping to solve the challenges resulting from data sprawl.  

Our File Analysis feature allows you to apply such criteria as “PII” and “PCA” along with ROT rules to all your content, lowering the overhead and allowing you to migrate just the important content and leave everything else behind.

You can then move just the content you need to a cloud-based solution such as SharePoint Online. Once here, you can leverage Records365 to manage it in-place, along with all other repositories or content sources such as file shares, Dropbox, OneDrive and hundreds of other essential business systems.  

It’s time to move past the outdated, cumbersome, labor intensive EDRMS that no longer supports solid productivity, full compliance with legislative requirements, and is only increasing costs for your business. RecordPoint’s Data Trust Platform helps resolve these issues and empowers both records professionals and end users to perform their daily tasks in a more efficient manner.

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