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…

 

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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