IM BLOG: How to Evaluate Vendors
This article is the culmination of my 5 years of research on every vendor in our space, and how you can get jump-started on the skills I learned.
The Obvious
Always, always, always talk to other records managers before you buy a product. Jesse Wilkins CIP CIPP/US CIPM IGP CRM CIGO ICE-CCP , Donda L. Young, CIP, AIIM Fellow and Steve Weissman hold a monthly roundtable. It's the perfect place to ask your questions.
Check the vendor's G2 and Gartner Reviews. These go without saying. So, let's get into the lesser known strategies.
Be Paranoid, Believe Nothing
It is easy to shift the truth and make it pretty. So, don't believe anything you see on their webpage. You see "We have an AI Auto Classifier for Records." What does that mean? How much of my records can it classify? How long does it take to train? Is it really AI, or is it a good old algorithm with the tagline of AI?
Unless you can see it and play with it, it's not AI. Getting your hands on the demo system is crucial.
Believe Nothing, Be Paranoid. Get access to a demo system.
POCs
Nothing beats actually testing out the tool. Push for an early POC, and actually use the product. Set time apart every day for 20 minutes to just peruse.
Most buying committees wait until the last week to start testing things out. Don't be like them. The earlier you learn, the more time and money you save.
Start with case studies
The hardest place to lie are case studies.
Order the case studies chronologically. What products do you see? What kinds of case studies? They might be a records management vendor with a great tech stack for all of your issues, but if all they have done in the last 5 years is eDiscovery, there is a reason for that.
Maybe they don't care about records management anymore. Or maybe, their records management technology is not as great as it looks.
Selectively Watch Webinars
Most webinars by vendors in our space are 30 minutes of fluff, followed by a 25 minute demo and 5 minutes of Q&A.
Skip the first 30 minutes. Watch the next 25 in double speed. It's mostly button clicking, but you might hear something that interests you. Watch those parts a couple times.
The creme of the crop is the last 5 minutes of Q&A.
Most webinars are scripted. Presenters just read what they are given. You can tell by their eyes and how monotone they sound. The last 5 minutes, well, that's where magic happens. They have to answer on the fly. So, they might just say something that contradicts their marketing messaging such as "We can't index over a TB of data." (Actual story, vendor won't be named.)
Don't get suckered by catch-phrases
Vendors use them to get your attention. Here are a couple well known ones.
Native Capture -- Connectors, Agents, APIs -- AI AutoClassifier -- RegEx -- No Vendor Lock In --- Secure Cloud -- Double Encryption -- Full Text Index -- In Place Management
The list goes on.
Some actually carry meaning. Full Text Index is a real thing, just like In-Place Management. RegEx is a tagging technology. You want your data to be secure and encrypted.
Others, just marketing jargon to make you pay extra. If a vendor keeps on repeating the same catchphrase time and time again, get worried, dig deeper.
The Devil is in the Details
Goes hand in hand with catch-phrases.
Take In-Place Management.
How In-Place is it? Can you do legal holds in-place? If so, how? Oh, tell me more. What does the tool exactly do to the data to put it on legal hold?
Asking "why" and "how" 3 times in a row works wonders. Over half the In-Place Management tools in the market keep a copy. They just don't tell you about it. Most Full Text Index solutions only index a small amount of data, they just don't tell you exactly how much. Most SLAs have shaky language at best.
Pay attention. Get the details. If possible, get hard numbers.
Learn Microsoft
Over 90% of unstructured data is in Microsoft. If you are in records, you are managing Microsoft.
Microsoft is here to stay. The earlier you learn their technology, the more it will help you through your career.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Microsoft has arbitrary limitations on vendors as well as their clients. Limitations such as 2GB/hr export limit, only 500 keywords allowed per search, vendor tasks take last priority, Journaling limitations, database access limitations (horribly hard to get your hands on Teams Data) ... so on and so forth.
Vendors have to find crafty ways around these limitations. And that's where many catch-phrases are born.
Take "Native Capture". Microsoft only exports as PST files or emails. Yes, even those Team messages are saved as emails on their database. Native capture is just a way to reformat those emails from the Teams database so that they look like teams messages.
If you understand Microsoft, you will understand the limitations of all of the vendors in our space. And you will detect their untruths at the snap of a finger. Try to commit those limitations to memory. Know them by heart.
Good news, Microsoft has a ton of resources online. They detail out exactly how the tool works. Here is a great resource on their search limitations. You can use this link to find all the other information you need on Microsoft.
Bad news, it's rather long and disjointed.
And you still need to be paranoid about the information you see. At the end of the day, Microsoft is just another vendor.
Meet your blog author:
Kaan Volkan
Kaan has read over 20,000 technical pages on IG technologies and helped numerous organizations clean up file shares. Now, he focuses on sharing his findings under Records Insights Newsletter to help more organizations overcome data challenges.
His unique take on technology and vendors combined with his brief engaging style makes for some of the most entertaining and educational webinars as well as articles.
Connect with Kaan