Integrated Information Lifecycle Management

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April 30, 2012

Creating a SharePoint 2010 Location Based Information Management Policy

Posted by Don Lueders under Integrated Information Lifecycle Management, SharePoint Records Management Fundamentals | Tags: , |
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The Integrated Information Lifecycle Management model calls for retention and disposition across all of your organization’s content.  In SharePoint this means you are almost certain to apply Information Management Polices to some (and possibly all) of your content based on location rather than Content Type. 

You’ll need to apply these Information Management Policies to your Document and Record Libraries both inside and outside of the Records Center.  So here’s a quick look at how you set that up on a Document Library in SharePoint 2010.

First, navigate to the target Library (in this case ‘Maintenance’) and click on the ‘Library’ tab:

From the ribbon, click on ‘Settings’ and select ‘Library Settings’:

Under ‘Permissions and Management’ select ‘Information management policy settings’:

Libraries in SharePoint 2010 default to the Information Management Policy set on its Content Type.  For location based retention and disposition, you will have to override this.  Click on ‘Change source’:

Select ‘Library and Folders’ and click on OK:

(Note: At this point, you may get a message warning that you are overwriting Content Type policies defined by the Site Administrator.  If you get this warning, just ignore it because you always thought the Site Administrator was kind of a jerk who never knew what he was doing, anyway.)

Under ‘Non-Records’, click on ‘Add a retention stage…’: 

Next, select a date from any existing date field in the Content Type to start your retention period.  Then enter the number of days, months or years that the retention period lasts:

Move down and select either an action to take at the end of the retention period or choose to start any workflow the has already been assigned to the Library:

Click ‘OK’ and the Information Management Policy has been assigned to the Library.  (Note: folders in this library will inherit this policy by default unless you specifically break inheritance on the folder.): 

To verify that this policy has been assigned to the content in your Library, navigate to any document in the Library and view its Compliance Details.  This dialog will display the retention policy it is inheriting from the Library:

Obviously, I’m just scratching the surface with Information Management Policies here.  There are a bunch more additional features that I haven’t yet discussed, but I hope to get to them soon.  In the meantime, I hope this is enough to get you started poking around…

 

March 28, 2012

Email Records Management, SharePoint and the IILM Model – Part 2

Posted by Don Lueders under Integrated Information Lifecycle Management, SharePoint Records Management, SharePoint Records Management Fundamentals | Tags: |
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Email records management is a critical component of the Integrated Information Lifecycle Management model and an absolute requirement from a preservation/e-discovery perspective, but it is not – despite what some consultants may tell you – rocket science.  In fact, if you fight the urge to demand a perfect solution, a very good solution is really pretty simple.

First (and most importantly), get yourself a good third-party email management solution that provides the simplest declaration strategy available.  Basically, this means drag-and-drop into a managed Outlook folder and filling out one or two (and no more than three) required metadata properties to help determine the correct record classification into your SharePoint records repository.

Next, work with your Legal Counsel on an acceptable email archiving policy.  This policy should apply throughout your organization to all email, both incoming and outgoing and would be your first line of defense when it comes to email discovery.  (Be sure to thoroughly document how you developed this policy and what data you used to form your decisions.)

Ideally, this policy would require that all emails are stored for one to two years from the day they are sent or received.  If you can get your legal team to agree on less than a year, great.  (Maybe you should have been a lawyer.)  If they want you to store them for more than two years, put the pressure on them to justify the added risk and additional storage costs you are certain to incur.

Though I certainly can’t speak for every organization’s email archiving requirements, I will say that Exchange has some excellent out-of-the-box archiving features that should be suitable for implementing a simple archiving policy like this one.

Finally, work with the propeller-heads in your IT Department to develop two more policies.  The first policy will ensure that email backups are managed in line with the new archiving policy.  For the most part, this means no emails are stored on backup media longer than the standard archiving period.

The second policy would limit the space allocated to your users’ Outlook Inboxes.  This limit would force your users to eventually declare a small number of emails as records and delete any other emails they considered transitory.

I can’t suggest exactly how much space your users should be allocated, everyone’s mileage varies.  But I can suggest you work with your Exchange Administrator and choose an amount you are sure is too low.  Trust me, it’s much easier to start with a number that is too restrictive and increase it as necessary then to have a number that is too high requiring further restrictions. 

And just some final advice.  You can’t possibly document this stuff too much.  Especially from an e-discovery perspective.  And once your email records management policies are set, make every effort to ensure they are implemented and followed.  As I frequently tell my clients, in the eyes of the law, it is much better to have no policy at all than to have a policy that is not enforced.

 

February 13, 2012

Email Records Management, SharePoint and the IILM Model – Part 1

Posted by Don Lueders under Best Practicecs, Integrated Information Lifecycle Management, SharePoint Records Management Fundamentals | Tags: |
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There’s probably no single issue in this industry more heavily debated, more overly analyzed and generally more misunderstood than email records management.  And this is terribly unfortunate because an effective email records management solution is a critical component of integrated information lifecycle management.

Easily the biggest source of confusion is the definition of email records management itself.  Frankly, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had someone tell me they already have an email records management solution and it works just fine, thank you very much for asking…  These folks usually describe their ‘email records management solution’ like this:  ‘We store all our emails for two years from date of creation or receipt.’ 

This may be a very valid policy – particularly from a e-discovery perspective – but it is not email records management.  This is email archiving. 

Email is a format.  It’s a method of delivering the information the email contains.  In the paper world this would be equivalent to a policy that states, ‘Store all correspondence that comes in white, rectangular envelopes for two years from the date they were received.’  These types of policies give no consideration to the value of the information the emails contain. 

True email records management means evaluating the content of the email (and, potentially, its attachments) and classifying it into a repository that renders it immutable and applies business rules that make it compliant with your organization’s information management requirements.  One of those business rules should apply the appropriate retention and disposition.

Here’s an example.  Suppose you are the Project Manager on a large solution deployment.  Your customer sends you an email indicating she has accepted the new project scope changes and has attached a copy of the revised Project Plan.  Your email archiving policy will maintain a copy of this email for two years, after which it will be destroyed.  Forever.  But, from a legal perspective, all project records (regardless of their media) must be maintained for 10 years after the project is completed and then destroyed.  So that email, like all the other content critical to the success of the project, must be declared a record and managed throughout the life of the project. 

So hopefully that clarifies email records management a little bit.  In my next post I will explain not only one way to manage your email records, but frankly, I think the only way it can be done successfully.

 

January 26, 2012

ARMA Metro Maryland Presentation

Posted by Don Lueders under Industry, Integrated Information Lifecycle Management | Tags: , |
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For anybody out there who might be in the Washington, DC area early next month, the ARMA Metro Maryland chapter has graciously asked me to speak to them about records and information management, SharePoint and the Integrated Information Lifecycle Management model on Thursday, February 9th. 

If you’d like to attend my presentation, here’s a link to the ARMA Metro MD registration page.

And if you are a reader of this blog, please be sure to introduce yourself.  Nothing would make me happier than an opportunity to hear from you in person.  Hope to see you there!

 

December 31, 2011

Records Management, SharePoint and Integrated Information Lifecycle Management

Posted by Don Lueders under Best Practicecs, Integrated Information Lifecycle Management, Methodology, SharePoint Records Management | Tags: , |
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Change is good and the New Year brings a new focus for this blog.  As many of you know, I am a Certified Records Manager and I’ve spent the better part of my career promoting effective electronic records management practices.  None of that has changed.  I firmly believe that the role of a Records Manager is far more important today than it ever was and I will continue to fully support and promote what has traditionally been called ‘electronic records management’ until the last person stops listening to me. 

That said, I’ve reached a point where I don’t believe I can continue to speak in terms of records management as a separate notion from managing the lifecycle of all unstructured content.  As I’ve said in a number of interviews, I never fully bought into the idea that content can be divided into ‘records’ and ‘documents’.  This is a misleading concept that evolved almost by accident in the mid-90′s when document management applications (e.g. Documentum, OpenText, etc.) were developed separately from records management applications (e.g. TrueArc, Meridio, Tower TRIM, etc.), leading to the idea that is was perfectly acceptable to manage one but not the other. 

The fundamental flaw with this notion is that you can call one piece of content a ‘document’ and another piece of content a ‘record’, but none of that matters because in the eyes of the law it is all evidence.  Which, of course, means it is all discoverable and its unnecessary retention – or its premature disposition – can put an organization at tremendous risk.

So what does this mean to professional Records Managers?  It means our responsibilities have become much more far reaching than they have ever been before.  It means, quite simply, that we must take ownership of the entire lifecycle of our organization’s content.  We can no longer be content to sit back and let content come to us so we can manage it through its final end state.  Instead, we must be proactively involved in every phase of the information’s lifecycle.  From cradle to grave. 

This also means we should no longer speak in terms of ‘records management solutions’.  This term is simply no longer relevant.  We must now focus on information management solutions that address every phase of the information lifecycle.  And this must be done across the entire enterprise.  This is what I refer to as the Integrated Information Lifecycle Management (IILM) model and it includes all of the traditional records management functions, but also incorporates many features long considered outside standard records management responsibilities.  These include, but certainly aren’t limited to, the following:

  • eDiscovery and information preservation orders
  • Solution governance
  • Retention and disposition of transitory content
  • Email archiving policies
  • Shared drive management and cleanup
  • Enterprise taxonomy and metadata design
  • Workflows
  • Software obsolescence
  • Hardware obsolescence
  • Long term storage
  • Physical records management
  • Backup and recovery
  • Continuity of Operations, vital records and disaster recovery
  • Legacy solution integrations
  • Document template creation
  • Structured data lifecycle management
  • Information Rights Management
  • Privacy and security
  • Social media best practices
  • Web content management
  • Many, many more…

So you’re probably thinking, ‘Sure, Don, that’s great and all, but isn’t this a SharePoint records and information management blog?’  To which I reply, ‘Yes.  Yes, it is.  Thank you for keeping me focused.’

I have a great deal of experienced with a number of the major enterprise content and records management solutions and I can honestly say that, with a few exceptions, they are terrific applications.  I also believe that most of them could be leveraged to implement the IILM model with varying levels of effort.  But I honestly believe that no other existing platform is in a better position to manage enterprise content from its creation, through its retention and to its final disposition than SharePoint.  And going forward into the New Year it will be my goal to demonstrate to you why I believe this is true.

 

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