One Policy - Only Sharepoint

Submitted by Rashid Farook on April 21, 2010 - 4:35 AM

Few of our Middle East customers has adopted a policy "ANYTHING ON SHAREPOINT" ... records management, documents management, eforms, applications(using Corasworks), collaboration, integration with Digital Signature, Arabic OCR, PDF/Word Barcode, Annotations etc. We now do only SharePoint.

Jack of all Trades, Master of None.

Submitted by Sanooj Kutty on April 19, 2010 - 4:30 PM

My choice to review SharePoint 2007 is because most of us here in the Middle East do not belong to the early adopters and have not moved to SharePoint 2010, yet. I do love SharePoint. It is a wonderful and easy to use collaborative tool. Maybe even moving to become tomorrow’s pseudo-OS. Yet, would it be entrusted to manage my records? And I have to reply with a categorical NO. Governance and compliance have a key role in how records are managed. Considering the fact that these factors influence ERM and that they may vary from country to country, I have excluded them from the scope of this review. It does surprise me that SharePoint 2007 does not work on the unique pointer principle and hence, if for any reason I have to move my record, I fear I may lose the link. A record once created is, more often than not, bound to be referred to in various business processes of the organization. I’d have liked SharePoint 2007 to allow me to store once and use more than once.  Also SharePoint 2007 depends on content types to archive records into the right repository. The ability to classify records independent of the library it originates from helps to optimize. No record is independent of the other and hence is always logically connected to another record; SharePoint 2007 sadly does not come with the out of the box functionality to manage the physical objects. While SharePoint 2007 does support indexing, it can prove a constraint as it does not facilitate inheritance of metadata from parent objects. Falling short again is the limitation of SharePoint 2007 in setting retention periods for particular type of content. Add to this the fact that one needs more customization requirements than what meets the eye and you are faced with what I would call a legendary Jack of Collaboration but definitely not a Master of ERM. Trust me, you are better of placing your SharePoint above your ERM and merely enjoy its very familiar Microsoft user experience.

Records Management in SharePoint 2007

Submitted by Greg Clark on April 15, 2010 - 8:57 AM

Microsoft SharePoint is fast becoming the ubiquitous platform for collaboration and workgroup document management.  The system has grown exponentially since its first release a decade ago to become Microsoft’s fastest growing server product.  This speaks to the desire of organizations to better manage their information and also to the fact that Microsoft has started taking the ECM space seriously. One of the knocks against SharePoint has been that it is little more than a basic document management, collaboration and portal platform.  This is certainly true of SharePoint 2003 but with the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in December 2006, Microsoft took a big step towards becoming a full-scale ECM platform and will take another leap with the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010. The advance towards respectability in the ECM space started in 2007 when Microsoft added records management to SharePoint, but the native RM capabilities in SharePoint 2007 can be considered rudimentary at best.   The basic approach for records management in SharePoint 2007 is to move (or copy) documents from collaborative document libraries into the SharePoint Records Center.  The Records Center is another SharePoint site that has enhanced functionality that allows for the management of records at the end of their lifecycle.  This is an important distinction between RM in SharePoint and in more robust ECM systems; the default functionality of SharePoint 2007 does not allow organizations to manage records in place rather it is intended forfinal, official copies of information managed by records managers.  Once stored in the Records Center, records are immutable; the system is designed for long term storage and read-only access. The SharePoint 2007 Records Centre has the following basic functionality: Create, apply and maintain a file plan, metadata scheme and retention schedules Deal with hold orders Generate audit trails and reports This core of the RM functionality in SharePoint 2007 is the ability to create and apply Information Management Policies.  At a high level , this allows records managers(without needing to work with an IT administrator) to define: Expiration policy and disposition scheduling Auditing policy – Which content is viewed, updated, versioned, deleted, expired, on hold, etc. Barcoding and Labeling – Ability to embed barcodes in Office 2007 documents User Statement – Highlight especially sensitive documents, inform users of actions to take with specific content (appears in “ribbon” interface for Office 2007 users) More detailed information about Information Management policies can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/recman/archive/2006/06/16/633393.aspx Records Declaration Can be automatic (via workflow triggered when a certain Content Type is selected or a document reaches a certain stage in its lifecycle) or manual Users can select “Send To” feature to send document, metadata, audit history and Content Type information to the records centre Record series can be added manually (by records manager) or automatically by a workflow Users prompted to enter any missing metadata Records Declaration – Some Interesting Side-Effects Changes file name in records repository By default does not modify the original working copy to indicate that it has been declared as a record (this is consistent with goal of minimizing end user disruption but is usually undesirable from a records management perspective) Multiple-repository model – Collaborative spaces vs. records spaces could cause confusion or unauthorized ‘convenience copies’ Workflow can address most issues, but requires forethought and custom programming   DoD 5015.2 Certification SharePoint 2007 was officially certified US DoD 5015.2 certified as of May 2007 and the SharePoint 2007 DoD 5015.2 Resource Kitwas released later that same year. Although this certification allowed Microsoft to say that SharePoint was officially DoD certified (which is a requirement to pass many organizations’ request for proposal documents), Microsoft recommends that the DoD Resource Kit is installed only where there is a formal requirement for DoD compliance.   Here is a direct quote from the Microsoft RM Team Blog: “The DoD 5015.2 Resource Kit is intended only for customers, who are required to run their records management system in a DoD 5015.2 Chapter 2 certified state.” In summary, the records management capabilities in SharePoint 2007 are a big step forward for Microsoft but clearly the product has a long way to go. Fortunately, Microsoft has realized this and has significantly enhanced RM in SharePoint 2010, which includes in-place records management, enhancements to the holds process and the ability to apply records classifications to a variety of objects in SharePoint beyond just documents (wiki pages, blog posts, etc.). The following link has more information on the records management capabilities of SharePoint 2010: http://blogs.msdn.com/mcsnoiwb/archive/2009/11/05/sharepoint-2010-records-management.aspx