November 2009

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Sharepoint records management feature are many, it also fulfills the regulatory compliances requirements of organization. Sharepoint recently certified on DoD standard, you check out the information listed at DoD site other vendors already certified on DoD standards are Documentum and Meridio these vendors are the oldest one and Meridio is already deployed in USAF, another vendor HP TRIM was also certified on it – but recently it is acquired by HP so it became HP TRIM –provided record management feature based on DoD. You can check out the entire list of vendors they are certified.
Microsoft has released a resource kit to manage records according to DoD standard check out the site and download the Office SharePoint Server 2007 DoD 5015.2 Resource Kit here.
Resource kit is available on Microsoft site.


Who should use this resource kit –organizations likely to enhance record management functionality with specific feature available in resource kit but not required running their system in a certified discipline NEVER used this product anyway.

Few listed features available in DoD 5015.2 Resource Kit-

Put multiple items on Hold in Sharepoint Record Center -once you put record on hold it will not go into disposition process and all expiration policies are suspended until HOLD removed.  So this feature available to select all records put them on hold.

Prevent document modification with WSS3.0 by the way this version is free so they can have RM feature – NOT to modify in WSS3.0

Another feature is – You can Create Document Library from a list item which is a handy feature.

Basically Microsoft has extended Sharepoint’s Record management features by just implementing add-on that is called DoD 5015.2- .

 Your comments are very important for us – please tell us, and let us know your feedback on it, you will read more stuff on RM in coming days.


Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Evidence of an activity executed by organization is called a record, and record management is the mechanism of maintaining the records of  an organization from the time they are created up to their disposal. In other word records management is the mechanism of determining the type of information should be considered as a record than a document.
If you want to understand sharepoint record management with a simple example -let's say your organization deals in cars manufacturing, every year management issues a new car price list and according to the policy it changes every year – because you see when you purchase Toyota in 2008 and want to buy again in 2009 it’s price probably changed, so the bottom line is- car price changes every Year. So how to handle this issue? Means very difficult to handle new car price which has to be issued in 2009- so  Management basically declares 2008 car price list as record if you are working with sharepoint- I think sharepoint will give you great feature for record management. So just have to click on a car price list 2008 and declare it as a record- now what happens, once you declare it as a record – nobody can make changes in car price list 2008 once it is declared as record- this is the basic difference between document and record management. Although current working copy is editable – but through some coding logic you can delete that 2008 car price list automatically from workspace. Once you declare 2008 care price list as record so your organization record managers have access to record vault developed in sharepoint and it will give you entire audit trail who has access this records.

Sharepoint will make your life much easier, new car price for 2009 issues management starts working on it and they collaborate it and finally archive back into repository.
To achieve this functionality you have to be a jack of sharepoint- define content type and define routing table and things get going. Define document library for care price in sharepoint workspace, store care price for editing there- then define content type and create a document library in Record Repository site and define routing table as well. Now few more steps at Sharepoint Centeral Admin home page then – it’s done.

Please let us know your feedback or any issue - or your suggestions.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Email is rapidly becoming the main channel of communication between customers, partners and suppliers, it's also becoming a key part of many business processes.
An email is often the only tangible record of a discussion, an agreement, or the delivery of electronic document.
You will use sharepoint to use and manage email in a record center site.
To manage email in your record center site, you need to work on exchange server 2007, that includes various features of record management.
Like you can create folder in exchange and push these folder into user's mail boxes, we call it a managed folder.
You can assign policies to these manage folder like retention policy,
expiration schedule and so on.

This process of managing email to the folder can be managed by users manually, or automated when You create rules there.
These rules might allocate the email to a folder based on the subject line, or other properties like sender's email.
although you can get the real record management environment when you have established a record repository site in sharepoint and move manage folder from exchange 2007 to this site.

Please let us know if you need any further information on Record Management or how you can figure out RM site in sharepoint.