Large volumes of unstructured electronic content residing on network file shares, home drives and local drives is a reality for many organisations.  Typically, these are unmanaged, with end users determining folder structures and file naming conventions.  Reviewing and culling of irrelevant and out-of-date content is rare, this task being made difficult due to a lack of metadata describing the content and identifying ownership.  Duplication of content is also rife.

Drivers for wanting to analyse and understand this content may include:

• To inform the requirements and design of new document management (i.e. SharePoint) and electronic records management solutions.
• To facilitate the migration of appropriate legacy electronic content into document management and electronic records management solutions.
• To enable the periodic re-organisation and rationalisation of network file shares to remove out-of-date content, reduce storage volumes and improve retrieval.

Working with the Active Navigation suite of products, Oyster IMS delivers a comprehensive set of services designed to support your electronic content analysis requirements:

Proof of Concept

Working with a sample of up to 50,000 documents of your choice, we can perform a proof of concept using the Active Navigation products to enable you to assess the capabilities of this technology.  The software is installed at your premises and is left with you for an agreed period of time to facilitate your assessment.

We present the results of the sample analysis are presented in a written report, providing:

• A profile of your documents by age, usage, type and size.

• Isolation of system files, temporary files and back up files.

• Identification of potential problem areas such as large collections of multimedia files (often personal music and photograph collections) or inappropriate materials (contravening internal policies).

• Highlighting of excessively large files.

• Identification of exact and near duplicates.

• A sample taxonomy based on the software’s content analysis and thematic extraction.

• Document summary examples also based on content and thematic analysis.

The results of the proof of concept can be used to develop a ‘hard-numbers’ return on investment model supporting further deployment of the technology across your enterprise.  It can also suggest elements of your information policies and procedures which should be amended to reduce your information management risk profile.

We are able to fully support the deployment of the Active Navigation technology within your organisation, as follows:

• Planning and Communication – Based on the data obtained from the proof of concept activity and in consultation with an Information Management professional from within your organisation, we are able to determine a document analysis plan appropriate to your needs.  The plan defines the scope and locations of the content to by analysed, whether and how the analysis is to be broken down into logical units, the internal resources required to support the cleansing and migration activities and a timeline for execution of the analysis project.  We can also support a communications plan to ensure that users directly involved or impacted by the project are fully informed and engaged.
• Software Installation – We are able to install, configure and test the server software components and client applications within your environment.  We work alongside your own technical resources to ensure the software is deployed in accordance with your policies and that the installation is fully documented.
• Managing Crawls – We can schedule, initiate and monitor the execution of the content crawls which are the foundation of the subsequent cleansing and migration activities.  We take care to ensure that crawls do not interrupt normal working activities – typically they are run during non working hours.  We also consider routine maintenance activities, such as back-ups or automated software updates which may interfere with the crawl process.
• Cleansing and Migration – Key to the success of the cleansing and migration activities is the development of clear and concise guidance for the end users / information owners who will be required to perform these activities.  Oyster IMS can create this guidance and provide on-the-ground support to users as they undertake their cleansing and migration tasks.
• Training – We are able to offer general induction, system administrator, train-the-trainer and end-user training supported by, where appropriate, customised training materials.