At its annual user summit held in Miami Beach, Fla., ECM solutions provider Hummingbird Ltd. unveiled its Hummingbird Enterprise 2005 content management platform, claiming it addresses three key market requirements.

The three requirements are managing end-to-end content life-cycle processes within Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Explorer, Lotus Notes Desktop and the Web Top, and from mobile devices; minimizing deployment complexities and reducing total cost of ownership; and ensuring that critical business content is traceable and auditable to help mitigate risk and enable regulatory compliance and corporate governance processes.

Now how did the Canadian company narrow it down to those three market requirements? According to Elizabeth Caley, senior director of project management, who spoke to PDFZone following the close of Hummingbird's summit, the narrowing down consisted of logging a lot of miles on a 50-day tour of customers' companies. "We brought four to six people, and we interviewed over 400 folks," Caley said.

"We flew from city to city in countries including Australia, Europe, U.S. and Canada. This was the largest thing we've ever undertaken, but we wanted to hear from our users what they wanted. It not only gave us context in what people are interested in, but it also established contacts to help us in development Web sessions. We could go back to some of those folks and ask them to try some of the implementations out."

Overall, Caley said, what users said they wanted were more desktop capabilities and content management ease. "What a user wants is to work in the applications they use every day, and we kept hearing the theme of more simplicity and hide the technology, so that's what we made our focus on this release," she said.

According to Gartner Inc. Research Director Toby Bell: "Regulatory compliance, legal discovery and other needs have driven organizations to seek access to and control over content enterprisewide. The typical organization has many separate applications that generate documents and content, each stored in dedicated repositories. To maximize the value of their application investments, organizations need a single, comprehensive view of what's there, simple access, and the ability to distribute the content to various business applications and to incorporate it in workflows."

In addition to the new desktop clients for Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, desktop search capabilities, and hierarchical security for advanced records management, Hummingbird Enterprise 2005 features a number of other significant enhancements, according to the company, including: