OrangeClerk history

21 The first reference in the files to the proposed new system was an anonymous note, dated the 25 October 1952, which made no allusion to the origin of the scheme other than to ‘the various ideas on this subject that have been ventilated in discussion and elsewhere’. Treasury file OM68/6/09.

15 The Public Records Act 1958, Chapter 51: An Act to make new provision with respect to public records and the Public Record Office, and for connected purposes.

Lotus Notes began its life in 1973 as Plato Notes, developed by the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the University of Illinois in 1973.

Compulink Management Center was founded in the US in 1974.

Micro Focus was founded in the UK in 1976.

Enterprise Informatics, a privately-held software company, was founded in 1981 by early pioneers of the document management industry. (Source: LinkedIn company profile) It would later be acquired by Spescom, a South African company.

FileNet was founded in 1982 by Ted Smith, formerly of Basic 4.

GMB (named after the original founders, Gillett, Frank McKenna, and Bachmann) was formed in Australia in 1983.

In 1984, GMB released DocFind 1.0.

Tower Software was founded by Brand Hoff in Canberra in 1985 as a software development company.

Autonomy was founded by Michael Lynch, David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt in Cambridge, UK in 1986 ‘as a spin-off from Cambridge Neurodynamics, a firm specializing in computer-based finger print recognition’.

Compulink Management Center was founded in the US in 1974. It created Laserfiche, the first DOS-based document imaging system, in 1987.

Ymijs was founded in the UK in 1989.

According to this Wikipedia article, Documentum was founded in June 1990 by Howard Shao and John Newton who had previously worked at Ingres (a relational database vendor). They sought to solve the problem of unstructured information.

OpenText Corporation was founded in 1991 from OpenText Systems.

Optika Imaging Systems (Colorado, US) sought a trademark for a product called ImageFiler in September 1992.

Meridio was developed in 1993 by Kainos (a Northern Ireland company and joint venture between Fujitsu and The Queens University in Belfast) as an electronic document and records management (EDRM) system based on Microsoft products.

Lotus Notes was acquired by IBM in July 1995.

Alpharel changed its name to Altris Software (US) in October 1996, according to this Telecompaper article published the same month.

The work of the UBC team influenced the development of DOD 5015.2 published in 1997 (see below) and the subsequent development of a range of electronic document and records management (EDRM) systems.

In 1998, FileNet released its Panagon suite of products.

The GAO report stated that ‘ERM information systems that were in place before the approval of this standard must comply with the standard by November 1999’.

For example, Saperion with e-Manage 2000, Impact Systems eRecords Manager, FileNet with Foremost.

Rob was one of the co-founders of Altris), developed document management systems, including (according to this South African ITWeb post of 26 October 2001), eB, a ‘configuration management’ application.

Optika eMedia was rebranded to Optika Acorde in 2002, according to this website ‘The Case for 11g‘.

EMC acquired Documentum in 2003. (Source: EMC offers $1.7 billion in stock for Documentum, October 2003))

Stellent acquired Optika in early 2004.

A US SEC submission in January 2006 noted that Spescom Software Inc, a San Diego-based provider of computer integrated systems was the successor to Alpharel Inc and Altris Software Inc.

In 2007, Spescom exiting the enterprise software sector with the sale of its US operation Enterprise Informatics. (Source – Wikipedia article on Spescom, original reference no longer accessible).

MoReq2 was published in 2008.

In 2009, HP Autonomy acquired Interwoven, a niche provider of enterprise content management software mostly to the legal industry.

In March 2010, Google acquired DocVerse, an online document collaboration company.

In 2011, Hewlett-Packard acquired Autonomy, a deal that resulted in some interesting subsequent legal issues reading the value of the company.

(Source: ‘The Norwegian Noark Model requirements for EDRMS in the context of open government and access to governmental information‘, by Olav Hagen Sataslaaten, National Archives of Norway, published in the Records Management Journal 11 November 2014.)

In a July 2015 article titled ‘Looking for an Oracle IPM replacement‘ in the blog softwaredevelopmentforECM, it was noted that Oracle was ‘clearly, and publically, going in a different direction and moving away from traditional enterprise imaging and transactional content management’.