I go way back with the DoD 5015.2 Certified Resource Kit, so I may not always be as impartial as I should be. But to be fair, I need to mention a few reasons you may want to think twice about using it.
As I’ve discussed before, the Resource Kit is extremely complex and can be horribly brittle. (In all fairness, this really isn’t the fault of the designers and developers as much as what it takes to comply with the arcane test procedures of the DoD standard.)
There are too many features that run off of timer jobs. This means that things often don’t get processed right away. Instead, you may make a fairly simple administrative change and have to wait over night for it to propagate throughout the system. That can get tedious.
Destruction of records is the same as hitting the ‘Delete’ key. This is not a huge problem unless your organization has strict requirements about guarantying that your destroyed records can’t possibly be recovered. If that is the case (as it is in many government agencies), you’ll have to go through a very laborious database expunge process each time you destroy a set of records.
The Resource Kit only allows you to create file plans that are two levels deep. Unfortunately, that’s all the DoD5015.2 requires and that’s what the Resource Kit provides. (There are some work-arounds for this problem. I’d be happy to discuss them with you, if you want to talk about them off-line.)
Finally, and probably the most troubling thing about the DoD 5015.2 Certified Resource Kit, Microsoft does not support it. In short, you can download it for free and install it, but you are on your own after that.
Apparently, this was a tactical decision by Microsoft and I understand not even Microsoft has unlimited resources, but if your IT Department is anything like the ones I’ve dealt with, you are going to have a tough time convincing them to install anything that isn’t supported by the manufacturer.
The good news is that Microsoft is well aware of these problems and I would expect to see some or all of them corrected if they certify the next release of SharePoint coming down the road. Stay tuned…
