We live in exciting times! Digital transformation changes businesses at an increasing pace. Many of the systems and tools we rely upon today weren’t even invented 10 years ago. Or at the very least they were only used by just a few early digital adopters in their private lives, not in business.
For example, the Android operating system was released in 2010—just eight years ago. Today it dominates the mobile OS market with over 85% market share. Another mobile forerunner, the iPhone, is also just over a decade old.
Information management has changed dramatically as well. The focus has shifted away from compliance and records management and toward managing information across all enterprise systems in alignment with business workflows and processes to boost business.
The Growing Content Chaos
The volume of digital information is increasing at an incredible rate. All data is expected to double every two years, and 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.
To make matters more complicated, data is scattered across a growing number of systems and repositories—either in the cloud or in on-premises applications—and the data comes in various formats.
Handled the old-fashioned way, by adding more content repositories and solutions, there’s only one word to describe the result: chaos.
Yet, the need to not only manage business content efficiently, but to also reuse it and archive it on demand is vital for business. Consider this: about 70% of documentation is recreated at some point—most likely because it cannot be found.
If There’s a Will, There’s a Way: How Vendors Must React
As digital transformation necessitates changing requirements for efficient information management, vendors are feeling the pressure to advance their offerings quickly. Many are moving away from annual or bi-annual release cycles to monthly or even more frequent updates. Vendors recognize that customers get the most value for their investment if upgrades occur at a fast pace: automatic updates are preferred by customers because they allow for a smooth and seamless transition to the latest features.
Today’s software also needs to support the way IT environments are built, whether in the cloud or on-premises. And when it comes to information management, adding another content repository truly isn’t the best way to manage the content chaos. According to a recent study by AIIM, 70% of organizations think the days of a monolithic ECM platform are over. Instead, they want to consume content as needed.
What businesses need and want is a solution that allows access to information within different systems and repositories, making the headaches of content migration a nightmare of the past.
The New M-Files Is Here – And It’s Better Than Ever!
M-Files has transformed to address the demands of today’s changing market. As described in my earlier blog post, Why Are Information Management Systems Moving to the Cloud and SaaS?, we have changed the way we develop our products.
Whether you are looking to improve mobile working opportunities, minimize manual work or simply enhance your document or enterprise content management capabilities, the new M-Files approach will fast-track your ability to achieve your goals. Best of all, the new M-Files will make you instantly cloud-ready as you can mix and match as many local and cloud repositories as you want. This makes M-Files the only true hybrid cloud enterprise content management platform on the market.
We call this new and better product M-Files Online.
M-Files Online ensures that you have the latest and the best of M-Files intelligent information management at your fingertips. The continuously improving product keeps you more efficient, and your environment more secure with immediate security updates. More agile and easy implementation allow for a faster time to production. It’s so easy you don’t necessarily even need IT for the task.
More Value with M-Files Online
As you might know, at M-Files we think document management and enterprise content management should be metadata driven, repository neutral and intelligent. These are the three pillars that our solution stands on. Migration is not necessary because you have access to content across systems and repositories – content that is easily managed with AI-driven intelligent information management. Add to that M-Files’ reputation for ease of use and flexibility, along with our built-in tools to support different use cases across industries, and it’s easy to see we’ve come up with a winning formula.
M-Files Corporation, the intelligent information management company, today announced the immediate availability of M-Files Online, the first information management system that enables organizations to flexibly combine cloud and on-premises deployments with a single user license without having to lock into one model.
M-Files Online offers a more intelligent and flexible, system-neutral approach to managing information that makes any organization cloud-ready. This new approach unifies information and related policies and processes across an organization's systems and repositories, including M-Files, file shares, SharePoint, and ERP and CRM systems, providing immediate access to existing information on day one, without massive, upfront data migration projects.
Enterprises are increasingly moving to the cloud or considering how it fits in their future IT strategy. According to the Association of Intelligent Information Management (AIIM)’s The State of Intelligent Information Management study, more than 80 percent of information management professionals are planning solutions that are at least partly cloud-based. Many cutting-edge technologies, especially around artificial intelligence, require elastic computing resources and are therefore often only cloud based. However, common roadblocks to cloud adoption remain, such as intensive data migrations, reliance on legacy systems, and security and regulatory concerns. M-Files Online removes those roadblocks by seamlessly spanning both cloud and on-premises environments.
“Along with mega-trends, such as the cloud, mobile and the rise of AI, there's a fundamental shift underway related to how organizations manage information,” said Miika Mäkitalo, CEO at M-Files. “As the amount of information explodes, the rigid, complex ways of the past no longer work. M-Files Online offers a new, more dynamic approach we call intelligent information management that leverages AI to bring together information in legacy 'dark data' siloes. M-Files Online is also the only solution that allows freely mixing cloud and on-premises deployments with the same software license. This enables our customers to benefit from modern cloud services, while also keeping the data they choose behind the firewall.”
Key features of M-Files Online include:
- Instant cloud readiness provides future-proof operations: M-Files Online includes the ability to freely combine on-premises and cloud repositories within the same software subscription.
- AI-powered metadata controls content chaos with context: AI identifies and brings together information from legacy "dark data" silos, providing immediate access to critical information.
- Connects to existing file shares and SharePoint: M-Files Online connects to a variety of systems and repositories, from network folders and SharePoint, to file sharing services, existing DMS and ECM systems, and ECP and CRM systems, without requiring data migration.
M-Files Online is available on a subscription basis, providing immediate access to new features and improvements with automatic updates. This reduces IT workload and ensures access to the latest capabilities, including performance and security improvements, even for on-premises deployments.