SharePoint User Group Meeting Tuesday 17th July 2007

See my brief commentary and my notes at the bottom.
Please feel free to comment!
*******************
Anthony Woodward from Unique World talked about Compliance and some of the items they were working on with Microsoft.
He made it seem like they were partnering up with Microsoft to Launch a framework for Compliance/Records management in the next few months!

He mentioned a whole list of records management standards etc.

CLERP / HIPAA/DIRKS/VERS/Archives ACT.

They are working on a VERS Compliant structure as this can be certified before a client uses it.
VERS is a Victorian standard…
Whilst there are a number of specifications in the VERS compliance, MOSS is 90% compliant with specification 1, 75% with specification 2….etc So there isn't too much to add to make it compliant in some areas.

What all this is trying to do is to track what happens with a document. E.g. Who read it, printed it, when they read it, who edited it, and when it was edited…..

The Microsoft Records Management Team seem to focus on infopath as being the key to records management.

What was interesting was the mention of Barcoding in MOSS. This can be used to track documents.
Did a Google search and came up with the blog below!
What’s interesting is this blog talks about Label policies and Barcode Policies!
WISDOM Message already has the ability to set it’s own “Label Policy” similar to this!
http://blogs.msdn.com/recman/archive/2006/08/10/694087.aspx

I later on went into SharePoint and set this up. You can define it by library once the policy has been created. And when printing a word document it asks if you want to add a barcode! And this barcode can be resized etc. Cool....

So all the buzz words floating around can make your head dizzy!
Information Policies, Mapped Content Types, Barcode Policies, Label Policies, Records Centre.....

Then as for the question about emails, they mentioned Microsoft Exchange Journaling – note you need Exchange 2007 for this. But this doesn’t do everything? Will need to investigate this a little more....
Then they also mentioned they resell Colligo for SharePoint and that it tracks the emails…But how? When I checked out their web site this wasn’t mentioned in the features lists! It would possibly be only a crude tracking, because once the email has been sent to someone, then what does it track? So need to investigate more.
They didn’t mentioned Email Vault, but an IT manager from a 1,000 person company said they were very seriously considering this product because you just have to be sure all your emails can be found. Note: That wouldn't track the email activity....

There is another product called Meridio which adds Records Management capability to SharePoint, but this takes the content out of SharePoint, even though it looks like it is in SharePoint.

******

So the questions is how can one implement Records Management completely?
Or is it only around infopath forms? Or maybe Word Documents with Barcodes?

What does this means for SharePoint? Do you set it so no-one can delete a document? Do you set archiving on all libraries? How do you track reads?
Sending links from SharePoint comes close, if one could track who read the doco…..?
Speaking with a colleague, he kind of reckoned that the information rights management might play a part, and this seems one possibility….
Also, should one provide the ability to add a journal to a document or email to say it was printed, mailed to someone etc? How far does one go to be compliant?
Considering one can track everything that occurs with a piece of paper, trying to do so electronically, faces similar issues.

Tom Bizannes
MacroView Business Technology
Solutions in SharePoint and Office
http://www.macroview.com.au