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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: , |
[3] Comments 

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.

 

May 1, 2011

The Compliance Details Dialog

Posted by Don Lueders under Methodology, SharePoint Records Management | Tags: |
[4] Comments 

SharePoint 2010 has a new feature – can I still call something in SharePoint 2010 new or has that ship sailed? – that I haven’t really mentioned as much as I should.  It’s  the Compliance Details dialog and it’s a great source of information about content in your SharePoint libraries. 

The Compliance Details dialog can be found on all record and non-record content in a SharePoint 2010 library.  It is essentially a list of settings that provide business information about the document or record. 

The Compliance Detail dialog is accessible from the item’s Edit Control Block:

 

Here’s an example of the Compliance Details dialog for an Employee Evaluation for someone named Robert Jones.  (By the way, if your name is Robert Jones, please don’t sue me.  It’s just a name I made up.  And I’m sure your evaluation would be outstanding.  Really.):

Out of the box, the Compliance Details provides the following information:

Retention Stages – This is the retention and disposition that apply to the item, as well as the source of that policy.

Name – Um, the item’s name.

Content Type – This is the SharePoint content type of the item.

Folder Path – This is the full SharePoint path to the item.

Exemption Status – This indicates whether the is exempt from the aforementioned policy.  It also allows you to exempt the item from the policy, if you have been granted the rights to do that.

Hold Status – This indicates if the item has been placed on hold.  (More on holds in a future post.)

Records Status – This value indicates whether the item has been declared a record or not.  In some situations, given the proper permission, you can declare the item a record here or undeclare the record here, as well.

Audit Log – This allows you to run several out-of-the-box audit reports or some custom reports that you may have created.  Again, this is assuming you have the proper permissions.

When used properly, the Compliance Details dialog can be a excellent, convenient source of records and information management information about any item is your SharePoint 2010 document and records libraries.

 

November 9, 2010

The Managed Metadata Service Application

Posted by Don Lueders under Methodology, SharePoint Records Management | Tags: |
[2] Comments 

This blog has always been focused on providing a fundamental understanding of managing records and information in a SharePoint environment, so I don’t typically like to get too deep into the technical aspects of SharePoint very often.  (And besides, isn’t that why you pay your System Administrators and SharePoint developers the mega-bucks?)

However, the new managed metadata services application in SharePoint 2010 is so powerful and so important to how we will manage content and records for a long time to come that I really believe it’s worth understanding at a deeper level.  So, before we get to explaining how Term Stores and Enterprise Keywords are created in later posts, let’s look at what a Service Application is and how a managed metadata service application is created.

MOSS 07′s resource sharing architecture is based on something called Shared Services Providers (SSPs).  SSPs work well for smaller deployments, but unfortunately they don’t provide the extensibility that one would expect to see in an enterprise-level content and records management solution.  This limitation is a contributing factor to many of the complaints you will hear that SharePoint is not designed with future growth in mind.

SharePoint 2010 replaces the SSP architecture in MOSS 07 with Service Applications.  Unlike SSPs, Service Applications are individual services that can be configured independently and provide resource sharing across sites running in different web applications and even in different farms.          

Metadata in SharePoint 2010 is managed through a Service Application.  This provides the centralized management of metadata I discussed in this earlier post.

To create a managed metadata service application, log into Central Administration and select Manage service applications under Application Management.  From the Service Application tab, select New from the Ribbon, and click on Managed Metadata Service.

 

The ‘Create New Managed Metadata Service’ page will open:

 

Enter a Name for the service, your farm’s Database Server and the Database Name.  Next, select whether the service will use Windows or SQL authentication (don’t worry about making this decision, your Database Administrator will know which option applies to you). 

If you have a SQL failover, enter the name of the database server in the Failover Server box.

 

Application Pools define a set of web applications that share one or more processes.  Essentially, they provide boundaries between processes so that a Web site or application in one pool will not be affected by application problems in other pools.  You’ll have to consult with your IT folks on this, but you’ll want to decide if you should use an existing application pool for the new service or create a new one.

Finally, you’ll want to decide if the new managed metadata service should also provide access to a Content Type Hub, so it can share content types with the site.  This can be a very effective way to manage both your content types and your related term store. 

Now click on OK and your new managed metadata service is created:

In my next post, I’ll show you how to leverage the new service to create a new term store.

 

June 2, 2010

SharePoint 2010 Document IDs

Posted by Don Lueders under Methodology | Tags: , |
[2] Comments 

Early last year when I created my SharePoint 2010 Records Management Wishlist, one of the first items I included on the list was a unique and persistent records identifier.  MOSS 07 used a document’s URL as its identifier, but this proved not only unwieldy (it was typically an enormous string of incomprehensible characters), it was also impractical because the URL changed whenever the document’s location changed. 

A unique and persistent identifier was possibly the most glaringly obvious omission from the MOSS 07 ECM/RM infrastructure.  One that had Records Managers all over the world scratching their heads wondering whether Microsoft really had a complete grasp of document and records management fundamentals. 

Well, good news!  Apparently Microsoft was listening to me.  (OK, more likely me and about a million other MOSS 07 users – but I won’t nitpick.)  SharePoint 2010 includes a Document ID Service that allows you to create a unique identifier that travels with your document from creation to final disposition without ever changing.   

The Document ID service creates a ‘Document ID’ column in the SharePoint 2010 Document Content Type.  The Document ID column is available in any document Library throughout the site collection.  In addition, the Document ID service allows you to specify a set of 4-12 characters that will be used at the beginning of the identifier.  This prefix can be used to ensure that records from different site collections will never be assigned the same Document ID.

When configured, this is what a Document ID looks like:

Here’s how you setup Document IDs in SharePoint 2010:

Go to Site Actions and select ‘Site Settings’.

Under Site Collection Administration, select ‘Site collection features’.

Click on ‘Activate’ to enable the Document ID Service.

Return to Site Collection Administration and you should see a new option, ‘Document ID settings’. 

Click on ‘Document ID settings’ and check the option to ‘Assign Document IDs’.  This is where you can also add the optional 4 – 12 character ID prefix.  You can also set the search scope for the ID.  (As this is likely to be a critical field, it’s probably a good idea to set this value to ‘All Sites’.)

The process of assigning Document IDs is managed by a timer job, which means documents aren’t assigned IDs immediately.  So don’t expect to see Document IDs as soon as you create the document. 

Also, if you have documents that existed prior to enabling the Document ID service, you will have to check them out and back in again before they are assigned IDs.

 

April 24, 2010

Records Links in SharePoint 2010

Posted by Don Lueders under Best Practicecs, Methodology | Tags: |
[5] Comments 

Microsoft is promoting the new Records In Place functionality in SharePoint 2010 pretty heavily – and they should.  The ability to manage records in the locations they are originally created is a tremendously powerful new feature that can help enable true enterprise-wide records management.  Look here for more on Records In Place in the future.

But another new SharePoint 2010 feature, Records Links, also deserves attention.  Unlike MOSS 07, SharePoint 2010 allows you to declare a document in a collaborative workspace a record and move the record into the Records Center, but leave a link to it in its original location.  This is out-of-the-box functionality and very easy to set up when configuring the ‘Send to’ option in SharePoint 2010 Central Administration. 

Records links allow you to have one official copy of a record (centrally located in the Records Center) and still provide access to the record from the place it was originally created.  Record links can play an important role in your SharePoint 2010 solution design, especially if you are managing a lot of case file records.

 

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