The new solution, called Coveo Expresso Beta, offers enterprise search functions for up to 50 users, 1 million desktop files or email items and 100,000 Intranet documents. The program is available as a free download. Users can access the program via PC or laptop through Enterprise Desktop Search, or via BlackBerry using mobile access.

"We want to re-educate businesses about the ease and simplicity with which enterprise search should work, as our customers can attest," said Coveo president and chief executive Laurent Simoneau.

The free download features several new enterprise content management features. Its cross-enterprise email search works for 50 email accounts, including PST files and attachments, for up to 1 million items. An Outlook sidebar allows functions like conversation folding, as well as the ability to search indexed content without leaving Outlook. And a desktop floating search bar allows users to conduct guided searches without leaving their current program.

Coveo Solutions is an information search and enterprise search developer. It is based in Quebec, and was founded in 2004. In addition to search-powered solutions for businesses, the company offers an optical-recognition PDF search engine.

Under the partnership, Taskmaster, Datacap’’s capture platform, provides for the scanning and indexing of document images directly into the FileVision content management software and automatically captures data from documents to eliminate data entry. FileVision’’s knowledge management tools store the data and build relationships to the documents and data. All information captured with Datacap Taskmaster can then be subject to FileVision’’s Business Process Automation engine.

"The synergy between our products will give us the ability to expand our offering to provide our customers with a greater level of automated capture solutions for high volume document process automation," said FileVision chief executive Dave Jones.

The two developers say the new partnership between their content management and document capture solutions will provide organizations with comprehensive, business rules-based automation from start to finish.

Datacap is a document capture developer based in Tarrytown, New York and founded in 1988. Filevision is an enterprise content management company based in Atlanta.

At our company, we like to encourage everyone to be green where possible. We recycle all our paper after we’ve printed on the opposite side, we use real dishes, glasses and silverware and eliminated disposable paper cups, plates and utensils, we dimmed some of our lights, and look for other ways to use the earth more gently.

However I like to think our greatest contribution is participating in the Green revolution involving the reduction of paper usage in business. In New England, many of us love our trees, particularly now in the fall foliage season, and we feel wronged when we see them cut down for paper. In our industry, we also feel frustrated when we hear that many businesses still use paper 50 to 80% of the time when electronic document handling would probably do. Our own company still uses a fair amount of paper for record filing that we eventually hope to reduce.

It is encouraging to see that many of our customers, using our technology, make a major impact on paper reduction. Our customers include all the major banks, many large insurance companies, quite a number of ECM companies, shipping companies and a wide assortment of other types. They all have at least one goal in common – to replace the use of paper in order to make business processes more efficient, faster and less expensive.

They do this by scanning documents and then processing them electronically – for reviewing them, for extracting important information, for marking them up as part of a workflow process, for safe storage and ultimately for secure destruction. The cost of paper creation, printing, handling, manual filing and shredding are all dramatically reduced while processing is speeded and security enhanced.

I doubt that many of our employees or those in the many other ECM companies pause to think about this very often, but every once in a while, it’s important to realize that what you do helps society and the environment.

Chief executive Steve Ballmer made the announcement at the company’’s SharePoint conference. He also revealed some of SharePoint Server 2010′’s new capabilities for the first time, and announced that Microsoft Office 2010 will also come out in November.

"SharePoint 2010 is the biggest and most important release of SharePoint to date. When paired with Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 will transform efficiency by connecting workers across a single collaboration platform for business," said Ballmer.

Highlighted features of the new enterprise content management software include improved web content accessibility, built-in support for rich multimedia and a new ribbon user interface. Ballmer said the new SharePoint features aim to help businesses control costs and give workers the information they need to be productive.

October and November 2009 will be big months for Microsoft software releases. Windows 7, the successor to Microsoft’’s Windows Vista operating system, is set for general release on October 22, 2009. Microsoft Server 2008 R2, Windows 7′’s server counterpart, is set for release at the same time.

Perceptive will offer the new services on a monthly, quarterly, or annual subscription basis. The company will manage and operate its SaaS offerings and associated infrastructure in its data center, and will offer an option for remote administration of the hosted environment.

"Perceptive Software packaged back office SaaS ECM solutions help organizations maintain their focus on customers, employees and business processes. The SaaS model brings organizations additional relief to capital budgets and technical staff," said Perceptive officer Darren Knipp.

Each back office service on offer will allow organizations to easily capture and store business content, access and manage information directly from business applications with a single mouse click, and preserve records for their entire lifespan, the company says.

Perceptive Software is a privately held software company started in 1995 in Shawnee, Kansas. Its flagship product is ImageNow, an enterprise content management system designed to facilitate document capture and retrieval. It serves over 2,000 organizations in 45 countries.

The Warren County Correctional Facility in rural northwest New Jersey is no exception. Although it is considered a relatively small county jail, it still had large content management needs, Integrated Solutions magazine reported.

Every inmate comes with a host of documents, starting with the criminal complaint, medical records, booking records, possession records, digital photo and fingerprint. Later on, the inmate generates disciplinary records, court events, psychiatric records, records of visitors, and a mail log – adding up to an average of 100 pages of records per inmate, the magazine reported.

This adds up to at least 150,000 pages of records each year for the entire facility.

In addition, ease of access to the records is paramount, as various government and legal sectors continually require access.

To deal with this challenge, the correctional facility implemented Alfresco’’s Enterprise Content Management software – this reduced the facility’’s document scanning time from one hour to five minutes, simplified the booking process, and improved the accuracy of records, said the magazine.

ECM has become an increasingly valuable resource for businesses and organizations in many sectors as the volume of content, both print and digital, continues to grow – a recent study from Basex found that the ECM market will reach $10 billion by 2014.

The EMC Documentum xCP Designer’’s Challenge, which was unveiled in May, asked its customers and partners to build a case management application using the xCP platform.

The challenge’’s five finalists were selected based on their application’’s breadth of functionality, completeness, and emphasis on composition and configuration versus custom code. They include Trends Global, Selectica, MatchFirst, Booz Allen Hamilton and Avantias.

The top three winners – which will be announced in early November – will take home $35,000 for first prize, $10,000 for second prize and $5,000 for third prize.

The xCP platform – which provides fully integrated technologies, development and deployment tools that emphasize configuration versus coding – is for use with development solutions for enterprise content management, business process management, intelligent capture, customer communications management, collaboration and compliance.

According to EMC, the platform can cut down case-based application building time by up to 50 percent.

Social business software provider Jive has attempted to meet that need, announcing that it will extend its social business tools across enterprise content management (ECM) platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint.

Through its new offering, Jive Connects, the company will enable organizations to surface content and activities from almost any ECM system from within the organization’’s Jive Social Business Software.

The first module, Jive announced, is the Jive SharePoint Connector, which unites content and activities from within either Jive or SharePoint into a single stream through unified access, search results, activity streams, and document storage.

"The act of generating content itself is not social – the real value comes in socializing content to generate the big ideas that can have a profound change on enterprises," said Ben Kiker, CMO of Jive Software. "It’’s critical that organizations facilitate connections – whether it be people or content assets – that serve key conversations, no matter if the content is in Jive, SharePoint, Documentum or some other [content management] solution."

Other IT sectors that are expected to experience higher growth thanks to the web 2.0 and social media revolution are software-as-a-service solutions for email, reputation and presence management, BIA/Kelsey reported.

"With organizations continuing to face economic hardship, users are being asked to do more with less and can ill-afford to struggle with learning new user interfaces," said Lubor Ptacek, vice president of product marketing at Open Text. "Enterprise Connect is the ideal way for organizations to simplify the user experience."

The application allows users to access and interact with business content directly from familiar desktop applications, such as Microsoft Office and Outlook.

The new version – called Enterprise Connect 1.5 – goes one step further to integrate Open Text’’s ECM solutions with pre-existing applications, by offering drag and drop functionality from multiple repositories, single sign-on, metadata classification, federated search, and U.S. Department of Defense-compliant records management. It also features improved scalability and performance, as well as an enhanced software development kit and a document viewer that supports more than 200 file formats.

Open Text also plans to expand its enterprise content management offerings to include its recent acquisitions of web content management providers Vignette and RedDot.

A new study from knowledge economy firm Basex estimated that the U.S. market for enterprise content management will grow from $4.1 billion in 2008 to $10 billion by 2014.

In particular, the landscape of the market is expected to change considerably thanks to the emerging popularity of open source content management solutions, fueled by the growth in the open source software market in general, the study found.

As the market grows, competition will increase in turn, and companies will have a greater variety of enterprise content management solutions to choose from, said Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst at Basex and a co-author of the report.

A recent study from e-Spirit found that the growth of digital media channels has created a particularly strong demand for enterprise content management, as 65 percent of businesses expressed frustration with the amount of time it takes to manage their websites.