Government of Malaysia scales digital records with Hyland Alfresco™

The Government of Malaysia's path to modernization

• Challenge: Legacy paper-based systems limited access, slowed operations and increased compliance risk. Records management practices and expertise varied across agencies, making retrieval time-consuming. 

• Solution: Hyland Alfresco™ powers DDMS 2.0, a centralized, multitenant platform that manages the full records life cycle — from creation and capture to maintenance, distribution and lawful disposal — with secure access at any time. 

• Results: DDMS 2.0 supports 408 agencies and 62,000 active users, managing more than 12.3 million documents. Paper usage has decreased by 40–50%, improving efficiency, preservation and compliance nationwide. 

Video transcript

Gowri Thangaya, Director of Government Records Management Division, Government of Malaysia: 

The Government of Malaysia currently is embarking on a very ambitious strategy for digital government, towards digital economy and towards the usage of AI and everything. For a decade now, we have established a system called Digital Document Management System (DDMS 2.0), and the beauty is it runs on Alfresco.  

We had a local vendor who introduced it to us, Crest Solutions. Crest came up with a model for how to integrate Alfresco as an open-source system. Currently, our system, DDMS 2.0, is being used by 408 departments, and we have around 62,000 users and around 12.3 million documents already captured into the system. 

Norli Adiba Binti Mohammed Noor, Project Coordinator, National Digital Department of Malaysia: 

We developed DDMS 2.0 in three phases. On the first phase, we focused on the open records. The second phase is to develop a classified record. For the last one, we focus on some more features to make sure that it’s easy to use the system. 

Gowri Thangaya: 

Since we have transformed to digital records management, nearly 40% to 50% of paper records, usage of paper records has been reduced now. The system provides access to the records 24/7, anytime, anywhere, on any device access. Access, preservation and security are the three important things that we need to think about. With Alfresco, we made sure that the engine is compliant to 16175. That was the main condition that we had for Crest, actually. We complied to 268 functions in that ISO. That is quite a lot. 

Norli Adiba Binti Mohammed Noor: 

For our future planning, currently there are 408 agencies implementing and using the system. Our target is that by 2030, 700 agencies will use this system. About 100K users will use DDMS because Alfresco has a data address, data use and data emotion, and all the categories are buying in with the security. So that's the beauty of Alfresco.