Vault Blog

Buying on-premise software is like buying a new car. When you first get it, you have the latest features, a brand new engine, top line performance, even that “new car smell.” However, it seems as soon as you drive it off the lot it starts to depreciate: wear and tear occurs and newer models roll out. Remember when having a CD player in a car was all the rage? That is, until you needed a USB port to plug in your iPhone to access your music library.

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Ask life sciences companies what questions they have about moving their content to the cloud and you will likely find at least one “security” related question. Indeed, this is an important topic, and it is vital that organizations address content management security at all levels, particularly when managing highly sensitive life sciences information, such as R&D or manufacturing information. Interestingly, there are still some who maintain that data is only safe if you store and maintain it in your own data center(s), not when it’s “floating around” in the cloud. This inaccurate – though entertaining – description of the cloud (we’ve never seen floating data), ignores the fact that data can be even more secure in the cloud, particularly when working in the regulated cloud

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Last year was one exciting ride for the Vault team. Now that 2012 has begun, it’s astounding to think about how much has been accomplished in a little under a year. Just this past February, we were at DIA’s EDM conference announcing our new content management product, Veeva Vault. Interest continued to grow throughout the summer as we signed our first customers and began their implementations.

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The Real Story Group, a CMS research and evaluation site, details the two main types of document management systems: transactional (think medical claims processing) and collaborative (such as those that manage submission documents for the life sciences industry). Indeed, collaboration is essential for life sciences companies today. Unlike in years past when most work was done in-house, organizations are now increasingly relying on partners and vendors to assist them with the intricate process of bringing a drug to market. Therefore, it’s essential that teams are able to work together seamlessly — and compliantly — to get the job done.

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It’s been a tremendous year for Veeva Vault. In February, we announced that we would be creating the Veeva Vault product and Vault PromoMats application. By June of this year, we had a full cadre of early customers focused on implementing Vault to support critical business needs. And just a few months later, on Tuesday, October 18th, we announced the general availability ofVault PromoMats, the life sciences industry’s first end-to-end promotional materials management solution. To celebrate, we welcomed customers, partners, industry thought leaders, and press to an official launch event at the Loews Philadelphia hotel.

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Last post, I wrote about a clinical study project manager whose role had been reduced to nothing more than that of a document hunter. Instead of developing new and innovative means of study report creation, or paving the way for multimedia report review capabilities, she was spending 90% of her time just looking for documents. In my post I explained how life sciences companies got into this mess. The question now is, how do we fix it?

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I was talking with a client the other day and asked her what her greatest challenge was in producing her clinical study reports. As a seasoned document management user from a Top 10 pharma organization with document management systems in place since the mid-90’s, I expected her answer to be something like “automatic generation of study report structures,” “intelligent hyperlinking” or “component authoring” – all hot topics in the world of Life Sciences advanced document management. Her answer, however, startled me: “Finding the documents that I need. Today, I am nothing more than a document hunter.”

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Have you heard about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)? If not, hundreds of vendors are eager to tell you about it. SaaS is so popular – Forrester predicts that SaaS revenues will reach $92.8 billion by 2016 – that many vendors are angling every day to find out how they can get a piece of the action. Because of this tremendous growth potential, and because there’s such confusion around what SaaS actually is, some companies will swear up and down that they provide a SaaS-based solution, when really what they do is add up what it costs them to host the hardware, install and configure the software, and maintain the environments. Then they divide this total cost by the number of months in your contract (typically 3-5 years) and by the number of users. Voila! Per user pricing and not in your data center. This must be Software-as-a-Service, right? Wrong.

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Remember those days in elementary school when you were handed a blank sheet of construction paper and a pile of crayons? Some of your classmates had a formula – green grass on the bottom of the page, semi-circle of sun in the upper corner, a mixture of flowers – scenes they had seen again and again. Others seemed to dive in, unconstrained by rules, and come up with something wildly different to showcase on the refrigerator.

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As content management professionals in a regulated industry, we often focus on what it takes to get documents drafted, reviewed, updated, and, ultimately, approved. We gather metrics, tweak our methods, and redefine our processes all in an effort to increase throughput, enhance quality, and reduce document costs. And this is important – very important – because each year the amount of digital content being created increases significantly, a trend that drives additional cost and complexity into content management processes. Just look at life sciences promotional content. In the last 10 years, the number of promotional pieces that the US Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communications (DDMAC) reviews on an annual basis has more than doubled from about 38,000 pieces in 2000 to more than 79,000 pieces in 2010.

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Fifteen years ago, before I started working with content management systems, I was a frustrated author with a bachelor’s degree in clinical psychology and a penchant for art and archaeology. I’d left my job as the Director of Marketing for a small, allied health book publisher in Philadelphia and decided that I needed to do something new and different – Information Technology. Fresh from IT consultant boot camp, I waited anxiously for my first assignment. At last, the phone call came. I was going to work for Jantzen. I explained to my friends and family that I was going to support IT systems for a manufacturer of leotards and swimsuits. Boy, was I wrong.

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