May 24, 2009

Office 2010 Beta Release…Anyone?…Anyone?…Bueller?

Posted by Don Lueders under Industry | Tags: , |
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OK, for those of you keeping score, here’s the latest official scoop on Office 2010.  (Oh, and yes, ‘Office 14′ is now officially called ‘Office 2010′ according to Steve Ballmer – who should probably know.)   It will now ship in the early part of next year (hence the name). 

That should not come as a big surprise to anyone who’s been following this, but I guess I’m still a little impatient.  I had a feeling the release date would be moved into sometime next year, but I still hoped to see a beta release sometime this month.  Thing is, I haven’t heard a word.  Not even an unsubstantiated rumor.  The silence is deafening.

Anyone out there heard anything I may not know about?   Any of you folks with inside knowledge of what’s going on want to shoot me an anonymous update?  I’m dying to see what they’ve done with the SharePoint Records Management functionality, but I won’t even have a clue until the beta is released.

 

March 23, 2009

Office 14 SharePoint RM Wishlist Continued

Posted by Don Lueders under Best Practicecs, Industry | Tags: , |
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James Lappin is a highly respected electronic records management guru out of the UK.  James twitters often about RM issues and occasionally references this blog.  I Genie Wishlistget a lot of readers coming here through links James creates in his RM tweets.  Unfortunately, I’ve never corresponded with James because I don’t twitter.  (It’s hard enough keeping track of all the other records I’m producing without adding tweets into the mix.)

Anyway, James recently posted a tweet referencing my post of my Office 14 SharePoint RM wish list.  James suggested that he would add the ability to manage entire team sites as records to the list.  I thought that was a very interesting idea.  Something I hadn’t thought of before.  What do you folks think?  Do you see a need for this?  How would you expect to manage whole team sites as records? 

I know that some of the guys on the SharePoint product team occasionally check out this blog, so it may put a bug in their heads if they see there is a demand for this kind of feature out there in the real world.  Let me know your thoughts…

 

March 9, 2009

Office 14 SharePoint RM Wishlist

Posted by Don Lueders under Best Practicecs, Industry | Tags: , |
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As part of a recent industry presentation I did, I created a ‘wishlist’ of records management functionality I hope to see included in Office 14 SharePoint when it’s released at the end of the year.  This list is by no means comprehensive and the inclusion of these features would not necessarily mean Office 14 SharePoint is a perfect records management solution.  (Conversely, if functionality on this list is not part of Office 14, that won’t necessarily mean it’s an insufficient solution.)

Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

  • Mulit-level file plan
  • Unique expiration and disposition throughout each level of the file plan
  • Significantly enhanced email records functionality (with Outlook client add-on) 
  • Expunge functionality
  • Hierarchical file plan representation
  • Out-of-the-box metadata based classification
  • Access to records from document workspaces
  • Unique and persistent record identifiers
  • E-discovery beyond the Records Center

What do you think?  Have I left anything out?

 

February 17, 2009

Office 14 Release

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releaseI’m getting a lot of questions about the next release of SharePoint, so I thought I’d give you all a quick update.  Here’s what I know.  SharePoint is a component of Office 14, which is due to be released at the end of this year.  The rumor flying around is that date is slipping and may be closer to early next year. But no official announcement has been made, so I’ll stick to the end of the year until I hear otherwise. 

The Alpha code was released to a select group of partners within the last couple of weeks.  Alpha versions are usually fun to look at, but often only vaguely resemble the final product, so I wouldn’t get too excited about that. 

The Beta version should be available publically sometime in May.  I plan to get my grubby little hands on the earliest release I can find and I will jump right to the records management features, first thing.  My intent is to write a review of the new and enhanced records management functionality Office 14 provides as soon as I have had enough time to analyze it.  The review will most likely come out as a whitepaper through the company I work for, so I won’t be able to post it here.  Once I’ve written the review, though, I’ll post an announcement and you can shoot me an email if you are interested in reading it.