September 1, 2010

AIIM SharePoint Practitioner Training

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So I just finished the new AIIM SharePoint Practitioner course.  I took it online, rather than in the two-day classroom training.  I have to tell you, I thought it was an excellent course.  There’s a clear ECM focus (this is AIIM, after all), but it’s really a very balance course, helping you understand what SharePoint can do for your organization.  The course is not too easy that you feel like you’re wasting your time, yet it isn’t so hard that you can’t get certified if you pay close attention to what’s being said.  Plus, there’s also a ton of content specifically centered on managing records in SharePoint – both in MOSS 07 and SharePoint 2010.

Next I sign up for the SharePoint Specialist training.  After that, it’s the Big Time – SharePoint Master.  Given my current schedule, I don’t expect to tackle the SharePoint Specialist course anytime soon, but when I do, I’ll let you know how it goes.

 

August 2, 2010

SharePoint Records Management Best Practices Slide Presentation

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Mike Alsup has been a recognized thought leader in the ECM/RM field since before it was actually considered a ‘field’.  Over the years, Mike (and the companies he has founded) did some groundbreaking consulting work with virtually all of the major content management applications on the market.  Like most industry visionaries, Mike recognizes the significant impact SharePoint is making across every sector of the business landscape.  Mike also understands the important role records management plays in an enterprise SharePoint implementation. 

Mike recently put together an excellent slide presentation on SharePoint records management best practices and methodologies and made it available on the web.  I highly recommend walking through these slides if you are currently using SharePoint or plan to deploy it in the future.  You can find the slides here.  Take particular note of some of the best practices Mike discusses that I’ve also mentioned in previous posts, such as site provisioning, master site templates and Enterprise Information Lifecycle Management.

 

July 20, 2010

SharePoint 2010 Content Organizer – Part 2

Posted by Don Lueders under Fundementals | Tags: |
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In my first post of this series, I showed you how to configure Content Organizer to run on your site.  In this post, I will walk you through each of the Content Organizer settings options and explain what each option does. 

To get to the Content Organizer settings, click on ‘Site Actions’ and select ‘Site Settings’.  Under ‘Site Administration’, click on ‘Content Organizer Settings’.  (If you don’t see this option, refer back to the initial post in this series.)

The first setting forces users to utilize the Content Organizer when they submit to the Records Center documents that have one or more corresponding Content Organizer Rules.  [Note - SharePoint 2010 allows you to use the Content Organizer to route documents to any Library or folder in your server farm and is not just limited to Records Center site Libraries.  However, because this blog is focused on SharePoint Records Management, we will focus our attention on managing records in the Records Center.] 

The second setting allows you to determine if you want to restrict the Content Organizer to Libraries and folders within the original site or open it to other sites across other site collections.  (This setting will determine how you configure the Target Location in your Content Organizer Rules.)

The third setting, Folder Partitioning, allows you to create additional folders once specific number of records are created in a target folder.  [Note - This feature may be particularly helpful to EU Records Managers subject to MoReq2 requirements.]  If this setting is not enabled, SharePoint will ignore the number of records submitted to each folder.

The fourth setting, Duplicate Submissions, controls how SharePoint responds when a record with the same name already exists in the target Library or folder.  The options are to create a SharePoint version of the record or append unique characters to the duplicate record name.  Records Managers should determine which of these options is most appropriate for their organization’s requirements. 

The fifth setting determines if audit logs and properties of the document are included with the document when it is declared a record into the Records Center.  This is likely to be important metadata relevant to the record and should probably be preserved.

The last setting allows you to specify your designated Rule Managers.  These are any users who should be granted authority to create Content Organizer Rules. 

The next installment of this series will describe how to leverage these settings to create Content Organizer Rules.

 

July 5, 2010

SharePoint, Records Management and the Cloud – Part 2

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[This is the second installment of an occasional series of posts on this subject.]

In the initial installment of this series I explained what cloud computing was and why it is likely to have a profound effect on how Records Managers do their jobs.  In this post, I will describe some of the risks and concerns you are likely to encounter as you and your organization begin to consider leveraging a cloud-based solution infrastructure for your organization’s SharePoint Enterprise Content and Records Management solution. 

Regulatory Compliance – This should be the primary cloud computing concern for Records Managers.  The legal and regulatory requirements applicable to your records repository located at your headquarters may be very different from the requirements that apply to your records repository hosted in another state.  And things can get even more complicated if your hosting service is in a completely different country.  

Security – Ask any information technology solution architect to give you their top five concerns about cloud computing and ‘Security’ is likely to be their first three.   The thought of maintaining your records repository offsite and accessing it over the Internet can be frightening to anyone.  And it should be.  Issues like user authentication, data encryption and privacy are just three examples of the many security concerns that you should be aware of if you are considering a move to cloud computing.

Backup and Disaster Recovery – No operations center is completely safe from potential disaster, despite what the hosting service may tell you.   A proven backup and recovery plan is a critical component of any cloud computing solution. 

Performance – As any experienced Records Manager knows, if your end users are not able to access their records quickly, easily and reliably, they will find a way to circumvent your system completely – such as storing records locally or copying them to external storage devices.  This loss of control could quickly make efficient records management next to impossible.  Any move to a cloud computing environment must not have a negative effect on the performance of your SharePoint repository. 

Data Ownership – This is an issue that probably doesn’t get as much attention as it should.  Records Managers must safeguard the integrity of their data.  This includes ensuring that there is a clear understanding of who owns the records maintained by the hosting service, as well as guaranteeing that your organization will be able to easily migrate its records to another hosting service given unsatisfactory performance by the current provider.

This isn’t a complete list of everything you should be concerned with when considering a move to a cloud computing environment, but it is a good start.  Mention these risks to a potential hosting service and they should have good answers for each of them.  If they don’t, you probably find another vendor. 

In the next installment of this series, I will discuss the benefits of hosting your SharePoint records repository in the cloud and why it may be the right solution for your organization.

 

June 21, 2010

SharePoint 2010 Content Organizer – Part 1

Posted by Don Lueders under Fundementals | Tags: , |
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In MOSS 07 documents were routed to the Records Center and classified in the file plan based on the document’s Content Type.  This worked fine if retention and disposition of your records was managed purely by the type of document being declared. 

As Records Managers, we know this is rarely the case in the real world.  A human resources department, for instance, would create a number of very different document types, all of which would be declared into the file plan folder for the employee to whom the records applied.   This might include Offer Letters, Employee Evaluations, Awards, Disciplinary Actions, etc.  All of these records would be maintained in the employee’s personnel folder throughout the employee’s career and retention would not begin until the date the employee left the organization. 

For these types of records, simply classifying based on Content Type (e.g. ‘Employee Evaluation’) proved painfully inadequate.  To manage the record properly, one or more pieces of additional information – in the form of metadata – had to be leveraged to ensure correct classification.  An Employee Evaluation record can’t be managed for retention and disposition effectively – but an Employee Evaluation for Employee Number 321654 can. 

To solve this problem, Microsoft introduced the Content Organizer in SharePoint 2010.  Unlike the MOSS 07 Records Router, the Content Organizer routes documents based on their Content Type and one or more of the document’s properties.  I believe this new feature will be a tremendous leap forward in improving the ease and accuracy of the SharePoint records declaration experience.

Here’s how you setup the Content Organizer:

First, the Content Organizer must be activated on your site.  To do this, go to Site Actions > Site Settings and click on ‘Manage Site Features’ under ‘Site Actions’.

 

Click on the ‘Activate’ button to enable the Content Organizer.

 

 Once the Content Organizer has been activated, two new options will become available under ‘Site Administration’:  ’Content Organizer Settings’ and ‘Content Organizer Rules’. 

  

In upcoming posts, I’ll explain how you use ‘Content Organizer Settings’ to configure a number of useful Content Organizer options and I’ll explain how to use ‘Content Organizer Rules’ to set up rules that allow you to direct documents to specific parts of your file plan based on Content Type and metadata values.

 

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