Microsoft will be big for document management – Dr Paul Duller
Software, Mar  21  2009 (Digital Energy Journal)

- Dr Paul Duller, information services director for Tribal Software and chairman of the 1500 member UK Records Management Society, says he believes that Microsoft will soon have a much bigger presence in records management services in the oil and gas industry.

Its SharePoint software is much cheaper than other document management software, he says.

In nearly all of its business lines, Microsoft was not the first company to create software, and entered the market with something which was not as good as what was already there, but gradually became a market leader, he says. This could be said for Microsoft Windows, spreadsheets, word processing and computer game consoles. It could follow a similar story in document management software.

“SharePoint offers a very rich and robust set of information management tools,” he says. “The capability for linking information is stunning. The 2009 version will have additional functionality to make it a true records management system.”

Many large organisations have moved their entire documents management onto Microsoft SharePoint, notably the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

Tribal Software works in a number of industries to help with knowledge management, including oil and gas and government. The company has over 2000 employees with annual revenues of $250m. “We help people address the paper mountain,” he says. “We say, we drill through information to find oil.”

It works with about 2200 different government organisations, as well as a number of oil companies, helping them to manage and catalogue their intellectual property. “We have clients where people measure records in shelf kilometers,” he says. “One client has 80km of paper offsite and 40km on site.”

“The trick is to manage the paper mountain and use it to add value.”

There are plenty of organisations which “create more digital information than they know what to do with,” he says. There are also regular stories of companies saving enormous amounts of money by being able to retrieve a document over a decade ago, for example during a legal discussion to prove what permissions were and were not given in the past. “Records management can pay for itself time and time again.”

Tribal Software

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