I was reading an article this morning on InsideCousel about Auto Classification of Records.  The main point of the article was that employees cannot keep up with the amount of electronic content created each year if they need to manually classifiy records.  While not perfect, auto classification may allow for "good enough" retention with little effort by employees for most organizations.

I attended OpenText Content World the week before Thanksgiving.  This is the annual conference for users and partners of the OpenText products.  Last year, OpenText acquired Nstein.  Nstein focused on content analytics technology.  This technology automatically ingests and analyzes unstructured content, identifying context, meaning, people, categories, entities and even sentiment, returning standardized, interconnected, structured content.  I attended a presentation at last years ContentWorld on this acquisition and thought this is great but expected integration with OpenText products to be years away.

Fast forward to this years ContentWorld and OpenText is demonstrating a beta product where this technology has been fully integrated with ContentServer and available in the next quarter.  Intelligent Information Lifecycle Management is not on a roadmap, but actually a product.  We, like OpenText, believe this has huge ramifications for application of classifications for records retention.

Besides the obvious of increasing end-user productivity by not having them manually classify records, it should provide the organization a good defense in how it classifies and disposes of records and information.  The OpenText product promises not only a very transparent process where automated classification decisions can be easily understood and explained, but also includes the ability to sample the results such that classification accuracy and recall can be demonstrated.

Our plans are to set up an environment for further testing this technology and to enable us to become subject matter experts on its installation, configuration and tuning.  Stay tuned as we learn more about this new product.