M-Files Announces New M-Files 9.0 Enterprise Content Management Solution

M-Files, the developer of M-Files flexible cloud, on-premise, and hybrid enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, recently announced that M-Files 9.0 features advanced support for customer deployments with multiple document repositories, also known as vaults.

With the enhanced interaction and cooperation between multiple document repositories, M-Files 9.0 empowers businesses with the flexibility to organize documents and other content along geographic or functional boundaries for maximum responsiveness and efficiency.

"M-Files 9.0 dramatically expands the options businesses have to organize and manage their important documents, information and processes," said Greg Milliken, president of M-Files Inc. "Data and processes can be efficiently segmented by function, geography, line of business -- literally along any organizational boundary. It can reside in the public cloud or a private cloud, or it can be on-premise, or any mixture of all of them, and the user interface and experience is identical."

The new replication capabilities featured in M-Files 9.0 ensure that, when needed, information stored in separate repositories can be quickly and easily located and accessed across the organization in a unified and seamless manner. The result is more efficient searches, better performance, fast disaster recovery and greater scalability, especially in larger, more demanding enterprise environments. The new replication capabilities in M-Files 9.0 enable a variety of use cases, including:
•  Cloud-based backup of an on-premise repository, or vice versa, (i.e., on-premise back-up of a cloud-based repository), which provides robust and instantaneous disaster recovery.
•  Replication of data between two or more sites, such as a corporate entity and its subsidiaries, or a business with distributed sales offices or retail outlets.
•  Publishing of select content from a corporate on-premise repository to a cloud-based project vault accessible by external partners, vendors or clients. In this scenario, a business can efficiently provide clients and partners with up-to-date price lists, product descriptions, brochures, and other material from the publishing vault at all times, while still maintaining a tightly controlled central document repository. Replication is metadata-driven enabling specification of dynamic replication rules, such as replication of all approved price lists to the publishing vault.
•  Moving content and information from an active repository to an archive repository for long-term retention. This example addresses demanding records management requirements, as well as those associated with regulatory or quality compliance.
•  Collecting information from multiple distributed repositories to one centralized enterprise repository. This use case is common in master data management (MDM) and environments with multiple contractors, vendors or partners working on separate but related systems or projects.

"M-Files employs a unique metadata-driven architecture that transcends antiquated folder-based approaches and is based on the notion that classifying information by what it is, rather than where it is stored, is fundamentally superior," continued Milliken. "The replication and archiving capabilities in M-Files 9.0 are no exception. Instead of replicating all content to multiple repositories, customers can easily configure replication rules based on metadata, or tags, so only certain types of information and content is replicated according to the needs of the business, such as backup and disaster recovery, long-term archiving, publishing, and improved performance and scalability in large and/or distributed organizations."

In addition to advanced support for multiple document and content vault deployments, M-Files 9.0 offers a variety of new features and enhancements related to mobile access, search, paper document capture and OCR, publishing and collaboration, ease of use and more. The beta version of M-Files 9.0 is currently available, with the official launch scheduled for late September 2012.