HP TRIM information management software today, HP TRIM 7. Version 7, says HP, will "help organizations better manage all of their business information, including Web 2.0 content developed in Microsoft SharePoint."
TRIM is an information management tool for large companies. It lets them store every single piece of data related to a specific business transaction -- say, a stock options purchase -- as a single record in TRIM's database. So, years later, they can go back and find all the relevant emails, faxes, spreadsheets, Word files, and everything else as a single database search result.
This is the important part: Employees are completely unaware of this. They do their jobs, and TRIM, carefully configured by the company's information management experts, automatically stores all records. So there's no extra work pawned off on employees to figure out how to store their own records. It just happens as they work.
In the last few years, Microsoft's SharePoint -- a social/collaborative tool -- has become a popular way to collaborate among global offices. But as you might expect, the rapid pace of content creation and technology updates among Web 2.0 teams often outpaces the rules of information governance and regulatory compliance.
The Radicati Group estimates that 87 percent of organizations using Microsoft SharePoint are using it for collaboration with Web 2.0 content such as calendar items, discussions, wikis and blogs.
TRIM 7 lets IT managers configure Sharepoint just as they do other office tools, so that every blog post and shared document related to a specific topic is automatically stored in the right record for later finding.
TRIM is designed to meet complicated U.S. Department of Defense rules, as well as a series of standards set by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. To be honest, most of the bureaucrats who include these standards as a requirement for all paperwork don't really know what they mean. What matters is that companies working with them can honestly say they comply with the rules.
As the world's largest technology company with more than 300,000 full-time employees worldwide, HP has already learned how to live with all of them.