Iron Mountain and Microsoft Collaboration

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As I “teased” in my last post, this week at the ARMA Conference Microsoft and Iron Mountain unveiled a new collaboration to enable both companies to better help organizations deal with their records management challenges. (The press release can be found here.)

This is a new type of collaboration for both organizations because it’s not limited just to technology – we’ll be working together on several fronts:

  • We’ll be working with Iron Mountain Consulting services to help them plan and execute records management programs for their clients that can be implemented on the 2007 releases of Microsoft Office & Exchange.
  • Iron Mountain will be making their hosted digital archive offerings available as “Records Centers” for organizations that want to use SharePoint for collaboration while using a hosted offering for their long-term records storage. (Remember when we said a while back that the interfaces for Records Center were open for 3rd parties to use? ;-) )

We’re really excited about this collaboration with Iron Mountain, and think it’s a great thing for our customers for several reasons. Firstly, it’s really validating to have one of the biggest service providers in the industry supporting our approach for Records Management.

Secondly, many of the challenges of successfully implementing a records management program are on the “business side” rather than the “technology side” – determining appropriate retention schedules, managing the required cultural & process changes within your organization, etc. Iron Mountain’s consulting services can offer some of the expertise needed to address these challenges. By helping their consultants deeply understand the Records Management capabilities of Microsoft’s 2007 releases, records managers that want to use Exchange & Office 2007 for their solution will have an easier time leveraging that expertise for their organizations.

Finally, making Iron Mountain’s hosted offerings more easily available to organizations using Microsoft Office & Exchange 2007 gives our customers more flexibility in terms of where/how they store their records, while still being able to take advantage of the new records management capabilities of our products.

Thanks for reading!

- Ethan Gur-esh, Program Manager.