Document Management

On the newly posted ESI and E-Discovery resource page, resources regarding the December 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure concerning the discovery portion of the litigation process are now available. Although discovery has included electronic materials for some time, the amendments specifically recognize electronically stored information (ESI) and E-Discovery, the process by which ESI is exchanged during the early stages of litigation.

The resources available were provided by colleges, universities, and other parties interested in helping institutions of higher education formulate their own policies to handle ESI.

The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee was recently recognized with an InfoWorld 100 Award for its innovative approach to addressing the need for collaboration within a public research university challenged by an ambitious vision and limited funds. The university’s first major initiative was transitioning from local LAN-based systems to a Web-based system with document storage and sharing capabilities. The university selected Xythos because it met their need for a flexible, secure system that could facilitate desired collaboration among faculty, staff, and students through document sharing.

In this free March 27 EDUCAUSE Live! Web seminar, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s Bruce Maas, Interim CIO, and Cheryl Ellsworth, Systems Integration Manager, will summarize the university’s experiences with the Xythos implementation, focusing on the applied uses of flexible solutions other WebDAV-based technologies offer.

The International Standardisation Organisation has announced the creation of ISO ISO 19005-1:2005, which standardises the format of PDF documents. PDF (Portable Document Format) is similar to the earlier PostScript (PS) format, both are from Adobe.

I guess the real question is whether any patent-holders are now going to crawl out from under their rocks and demand royalties. Adobe certainly appears to have done the right thing and granted liberal patent licences, all credit to them.