IRM Evaluation Documents - Where Are They Now?

IRM Evaluation Documents - Where Are They Now?

Among the key benefits of Oracle IRM is the tracking of external communications, so I thought it might be interesting to summarise a few facts and figures about our evaluation service - which is, after all, a publicly accessible self-registration IRM service.

Oracle has been running the service for about 3 years now, and it has been used by about 3000 users. So, there are at least 3000 copies of our demo documents out there somewhere - but who is using them currently, and where?

To answer this question, I ran an audit report for the last 7 days. The report tells me that there are about 60 users actively using the service right now. The report tells me that those 60 users are spread across about 15 countries - predominantly the USA and UK, but also in China, India, Brazil, Portugal, Germany, Slovakia, Austria, France, Czech Republic, Ireland and others - as shown in the following map.

New users are self-registering via the simple demo page at a rate of 1 or 2 per day. The last few days have seen new accounts created and used by Forrest in China (an Oracle colleague), Telma in Brazil, and Nonogaki in Japan. Welcome aboard - please send us some feedback. Two more have registered while I've been writing this article.

The log also tells me which users are users which documents, which gives some indication of what interests them most. Here is a glimpse of the activities of the three users mentioned above.

This ongoing accumulation of new users by self-registration demonstrates that IRM can quite easily meet the needs of external communication and collaboration without creating an administrative burden. We just sit back and let users register themselves - although in a real deployment we obviously recommend manual and/or automated approval processes for new accounts.

In fact, we don't do any manual rights admin for the new users. The self-registration process grants each new user the rights we want them to have, and those rights apply to pre-existing content as well as any new content we might make available - or that users seal for themselves. We set up a policy framework three years ago, and users just come and go over time without us needing to change anything.

The only time we intervene manually is when we're using the evaluation service to host a formal proof of concept and we want to explore capabilities that the simple demo does not cover.

On top of the admin benefits of self-service, the above facts and figures demonstrate that those of us who run the evaluation service have a powerful insight into who is using and creating sealed documents, how they are using them, how often, where, and when.