SharePointRecordsManagement.com

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I have about as much experience with the MOSS 2007 DoD 5015.2 Resource Kit as anyone else and I intend to write about it ad nauseam in future posts.  But before I do that, I’d like to make a couple of comments about the DoD 5015.2 Standard in general.

I’ve worked with the Standard for many years.  I’ve been involved in product development and certification testing for several major Records Management applications, including Documentum, Meridio, Interwoven and SharePoint.  I could write a book about the 5015.2, but I promised myself I’d keep these posts short and to-the-point.  So here are a few comments.  Please let me know if you disagree with me.

• The Standard is too complicated.  There are a tremendous amount of unnecessary requirements in the DoD 5015.2 that RMA vendors spend a lot of time and money on developing the technology to meet.  A lot of these requirements are for functionality that really won’t ever be used in a real-world implementation.
• The Standard is too narrowly focused on how the US DoD manages records.  This is especially true with regard to file plan structures and records disposition processing.
• Nobody seems to agree on what being certified really means.  If you take Product X, which has been certified in a testing environment and implement it in a completely different manner at your organization, is the certification still valid?  Who checks to make sure it is?  More importantly, what is being tested?  Is it the application’s functionality that meets the requirements?  Or is it the application’s ability to be customized or configured to meet the requirements?  There’s a big difference.
• Despite its many faults, the Standard is vitally important and I wouldn’t consider investing in a solution that wasn’t certified.  Having all the functionality that the Standard requires is nice, but the real value of certification is that it legitimizes the solution as a top level Records Management application and validates it as a secure records repository.

Records Managers are faced with a relatively new problem; one that wasn’t even a concern just fifteen or twenty years ago.  Software applications become obsolete over time.  This means that electronic records written twenty years ago using WordStar (remember that one?) may not be readable today.
 
The same goes for hardware.  Data from the 1970 US Census, for instance, was recorded on a tape system that could only be read by one specific type of computer.  And only one of those computers still exists today.  You can go see it yourself; it’s on display in the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

This becomes a serious issue when you consider that some records must be stored for decades or longer.  Fortunately, a few key organizations have taken notice of this problem and are attempting to address it.  Most notably, the US National Archives and Records Administration, which is developing a long-term records migration plan as part of their Electronic Records Archives program.

I would argue that software and hardware obsolescence is yet another reason to you should seriously consider using SharePoint as your records repository.  I know that a lot of people are uncomfortable with Microsoft’s domination of the software industry and I can empathize.  But you have to admit, they aren’t going to disappear overnight.  Not only that, but Microsoft sets the standards that other organizations follow, such as creating documents in XML format.

You may not be able to read that WordStar record from twenty years ago, but I can almost guaranty you’ll be able to read a SharePoint record one hundred years from now. 

And if you can’t read a record SharePoint record a hundred years from now, please let me know and I’ll apologize.