SharePointRecordsManagement.com

Well, I made it out to Vegas for ARMA.  Just barely.  Had my trip shortened and then missed my flight out on Monday morning (don’t ask), so I really only had one full day at the show.  Barely enough time to lose a quick 20 bucks at Blackjack.  Sorry if any of you wanted to talk and couldn’t find me. 

I was there long enough to see a lot of interest in SharePoint and a lot of folks who were disappointed by Microsoft’s meager attendance.  My friend Sean Dillon from Microsoft was there and he gave some really good presentations on SharePoint Records Management at the OmniRIM booth.  Sean works out of the Northern Virginia Microsoft office and he probably knows more about Records Management than anyone else at the company.  If you missed Sean’s presentations and want to get in touch with him, let me know and I’ll try to hook you up.

The few people I talked to all asked me questions about the DoD 5015.2 Certified Resource Kit, so there is clearly still interest in it.  I’ll try to focus my next couple of posts on it.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, expiration policy based on Content Type or location works to a limited extent, but customized expiration policies based on metadata properties is a far more useful solution.  This is particularly true when setting up event-based retention schedules. 

An alert reader sent me this link: 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc453773.aspx.

This is a terrific source of information on how to setup the code to configure SharePoint to base expiration on metadata.  Check it out.

Here’s another alert.  The gang down at Gartner released their ‘Magic Quadrant’ report for Enterprise Content Management a few weeks ago.  It has some interesting things to say about SharePoint.  It places SharePoint in the ‘Leaders’ quadrant, saying it has at least basic capabilities in all six of the core ECM functional components it tests for.  The report says Microsoft has driven the most change of any vendors in the ECM space over the last year and a half. 

Gartner suggests using SharePoint for mass deployment while adopting one of the big ECM solutions for high-end processes may be a good strategy for the next few years.  Something I don’t necessarily disagree with.  They also suggest customers may want to review how SharePoint is performing over time, evaluate future releases and determine whether a continued strategy of coexistence with another solution is still the best strategy.  This is something I’ve already discussed in earlier posts.

The report touches briefly on SharePoint records management.  Gartner believes SharePoint has made progress on records management, but still has some ‘maturing’ to do.

If you have trouble sleeping anytime in the near future, you can read the whole report here: http://www.mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article3/article3.html.

In case you guys missed it, those wacky folks at the National Archives just gave a big thumbs up to Version 3 of the DoD 5015.2 Standard.  Looks like it’s going to continue to be tough for any other standards to get a foothold here in the States.

You can find more about it here: http://www.aiim.org/Infonomics/ArticleView.aspx?ID=35159

Managing Content Types is essential to effectively managing records in SharePoint.  Think of Content Types as templates that allow you to assign metadata properties and sample content to a document.  For instance, you may have a document called Purchase Order that a number of your end users create with certain regularity.  You can create a  Content Type called Purchase Order Content Typethat has all the metadata relavant to a Purchase Order and associate a sample Purchase Order document to it.  This way whenever a new Purchase Order is created, your end users just go to the appropriate Document Library, click on ‘New’, select the Purchase Order Content Type, fill in the necessary metadata and create the document. 

Content Types play a big role in Records Management because SharePoint uses the document’s Content Type to determine which Records Center Library the document belongs in when it is declared a record.  (This is configured in the Records Routing table, which we will talk about in future posts.) 

Keeping with the example from above, you may have a Records Center Library called Purchase Orders which contains records of all the Purchase Orders created in your organization.  Expiration assigned to this Library may be ‘Destroy 5 Years after Creation’.  When your end user has completed the new Purchase Order and is required to declare it a record in your Records Center, all he or she must do is right-click the record and select the ‘Send to Records Center’ option.  The document will be copied into the appropriate Records Center Library based on its Content Type.  (This process also creates two documents in the Records Center Library that are associated with the new record.  One document contains all the original metadata assigned to the document and the other contains a complete audit trail of the document.  Both these documents can be used for evidentiary purposes.) 

This is how Content Types work with the Records Center out-of-the-box.  There are a number of additional ways to utilize Content Types to improve your Records Management solutions, and I will discuss them here soon.