Last year was a big year for Windows 7 deployments. In 2010 alone, Kraft Kennedy deployed Windows 7 to over 20 firms covering over 18,000 desktops. This was mainly caused by a combination of three factors: the Great Recession, the low adoption rate of Windows Vista, and the technical expertise of Kraft Kennedy consultants (hold for applause). Now that firms have upgraded their desktops, they are now starting to focus less on the “need to have” projects and more on the “like to have” projects.
One such topic that tends to come up is DMS consolidation. Firms are able to work in a distributed environment, and nothing is “broken” in that setup. But the experience can be enhanced. Consolidation can provide a number of advantages including:
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- One location for all firm-wide matter-related documents and email in an iManage MCC or eDOCS Dynamic View environment
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- One location to manage retention policies for archiving
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- Easier cross-office collaboration and searching
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- Less backend infrastructure to maintain, such as middle tier servers, indexers, SQL databases, file shares
This sounds amazing, but remember that any DMS consolidation project requires a big backbone of non-DMS equipment and technology. There’s the WAN connection bandwidth & latency, WAN acceleration devices, and redundant and highly available storage, database, and application server systems. These foundations should be in place in order for a DMS consolidation project to stand on it’s own successfully. Notice how we haven’t even started discussing the number of DMS servers, indexers, and the redundancy of those systems.
Beyond the infrastructure requirements, Firms can also be hesitant about consolidation for DMS-related reasons such as document number changes, document history preservation, long migration time-lines, and high consulting costs. All of these concerns can be mitigated through our use of technology together.
Now is the time to start thinking about how your global Firm can collaborate and manage your enterprise content in a more efficient way. The first step is ensuring your infrastructure can handle it.