June 11, 2010

Autonomy Acquires CA Records Manager

Posted by Don Lueders under Industry | Tags: |
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In one of the more perplexing acquisitions I’ve seen in the Records and Information Management industry, Autonomy recently announced it was acquiring CA Technologies’ Information Governance division.  (Here’s industry analyst, Forrester’s early take on the deal.)  This means that Autonomy will now own – along with a few secondary applications – CA’s Records Manager solution.

My sense is this was a strategic decision by Autonomy to acquire a proven DoD 5015.2 certified records management application.  The confusing part is that Autonomy already owns (also through acquisition) both Meridio and Interwoven. 

Having worked with all three of these products (particularly Meridio), I can tell you they all provide some excellent records and information management functionality.  The problem, though, is there is a great deal of overlap between the features these solutions provide.  Additionally, my personal experiences haven’t given me any confidence that Autonomy fully understands the records management space, so I’m afraid this deal may be taking CA’s solution out of the hands of a few very qualified Records Management professionals and dropping it into an organization that that doesn’t know exactly how to leverage its capabilities. 

So what is my advice if you are currently using any of these solutions?  At the very least, wait to see how this acquisition plays out before you renew any agreements.  Autonomy has a lot of work ahead of it if they plan to integrate all of these products into one unified solution. 

Having said that, this may very well be a good opportunity to repurpose the money you have allocated for CA Records Manager, Meridio or Interwoven into a new SharePoint deployment or a SharePoint 2010 upgrade.   

Just a thought…

 

June 6, 2010

SharePoint, Records Management and the Cloud – Part 1

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[This is the first installment of an occasional series of posts on this subject.]

From the start, one of the primary goals of this blog has been to provide Records Managers with a better understanding of some of the critical technical issues they are likely to encounter while managing their records in a SharePoint environment.  And while I don’t expect readers to fully understand everything about any technical issues I write about (frankly, I don’t fully understand some of them myself), I do hope that I’ve provided enough information on some issues to give you fundamental understanding of how things work and how it applies to SharePoint-based records management. 

Which brings us to cloud computing.  The notion of cloud computing is certainly not specific to SharePoint nor is it specific to records management.  But it is relevant to SharePoint records management because it is an absolute paradigm shift in how information is managed and your organization will almost certainly consider moving some or even all, of their Information Technology services to a cloud-based solution.  And this includes your records repository and the solution you use to manage it.

So just what, exactly, is Cloud Computing, then?  Good question.  If you asked a hundred IT guys to define cloud computing, you are very likely to get a hundred different answers.  (And worse, I once asked a sales guy from a cloud hosting service what it is and he told me, ‘It’s whatever you want it to be’.  Thanks for the help, bud.)  I like to stick to a fairly simple definition.  To me, cloud computing is nothing more than Internet-based computing where an organization shares resources (hardware, software, technical support, etc.) delivered through data centers physically separate from the organization. 

Normally, customers don’t own the cloud computing infrastructure they use.  Instead, they essentially rent it.  There are two basic pricing models for cloud computing: a subscription based model and a utility based model.  The subscription based model requires a set payment for using the hosting service’s infrastructure and typically minimizes the restrictions it applies to the customer’s usage.  The utility based model packages the hosting company’s resources into a metered service whereby the customer pays only for the resources they use, just like they pay for their gas or electricity. 

To be clear, cloud computing offers tremendous benefits for managing your SharePoint deployment, but it also poses some potentially disastrous risks.  In the next installment of this series, I’ll explain what they are.

 

June 2, 2010

SharePoint 2010 Document IDs

Posted by Don Lueders under Methodology | Tags: , |
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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.

 

May 18, 2010

Thoughts on SharePoint Saturday DC

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Just a couple of quick observations from last weekend’s SharePoint Saturday in DC:

  • Interest in SharePoint as an enterprise ECM/RM solution is exploding.  Big drivers behind this include ease of use, user acceptability, overall cost of deployment versus the other, more traditional vendors, a growing developer and system administrator base and, of course, high expectations for SharePoint 2010.
  • The number of qualified SharePoint developers and system administrators is increasing rapidly, but failing to keep with demand.  If you were an experienced SharePoint developer at last weekend’s show, you could have dropped your resume off at almost any booth and would have gotten a job offer.  Probably on the spot. 
  • There was a notable lack of interest in managing SharePoint in the ‘cloud’.  (This seemed to be true regardless of how you defined that term.)  Part of this may be due to the fact that a large portion of the attendees were employed by or working for Federal agencies and Federal agencies still haven’t embraced the notion of managing their data in the cloud due to perceived risks around content ownership and security.  This may change as the agencies begin to recognize the inherent benefits of cloud-based architecture and become more comfortable with allowing their records to be stored outside their agencies firewalls.  Or it may not.  Jury’s still out there.
  • Possibly the hottest single topic was solution migration and upgrades.  It seemed as though everyone wanted to know what was required to move from their current legacy ECM solution to SharePoint 2010 or from MOSS 07 to SharePoint 2010 or from a homegrown ad-hoc system of file shares into SharePoint 2010.  Companies providing these types of services will do very well over the next couple of years.
  • There was a great deal of conversation specifically focused around SharePoint as an enterprise records management solution.  The topic came up frequently in Q&A sessions and there was a great deal of excitement around the new records management features in SharePoint 2010.  Buzz seemed to focus on managed metadata, records in-place, multiple Records Center deployment, Document ID’s and other new features that provide value to records management (as well as general content management) across the enterprise.
  • John Holliday’s terrific session on the new records management features in SharePoint 2010 was one of the most well-attended presentations of the day, despite being the last session on the schedule.  John’s audience was fully engaged and asked the kinds of informed questions that made it clear they were serious about learning what it takes to implement a SharePoint records management solution.

Did you attend SharePoint Saturday in DC or any of the other SharePoint Saturdays around the country?  Did I miss anything?  Please add your observations in the comments below.

 

May 5, 2010

SharePoint Saturday DC

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I’ll be working the company booth at SharePoint Saturday DC on May 15th.  I’d love to talk to anyone interested in discussing SharePoint Records Management, so if you plan to attend, please let me know or just stop by our booth. 

If you don’t plan to attend and you live in the DC area, you may want to consider it.  I know it’s on a Saturday (in May, no less!), but it’s free to the public and it already looks to be a huge success based on the number of registered attendees.  (Currently over 1200 and counting.)  The list of speakers is impressive, too.

Here’s a link to the conference webpage.  Hope to see you there…

 

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