Full RSS Feed
Receive
the Free CMSWire Newsletter
With considerable anticipation and a blaze of publicity SharePoint 2010 was released in May. Included with it was new and improved records management functionality designed to fill SharePoint 2007’s weaknesses on this front.
Records Management Weaknesses in SP2007
In this respect, Doug Miles, Director of Market Intelligence, AIIM Europe, in a recent webinar on records management and SharePoint 2010 identified three principal weaknesses that SharePoint 2010 aimed to tackle. These included
- Record Management abilities isn't very robust
- Insufficient granularity of security
- No way to enforce classification template policy for new team sites
And yes, he says, some of these have been addressed in 2010, but with many companies still using SharePoint 2007 and others still trying to get to grips with SharePoint 2010, he says it is early to form an opinion as to whether its records management in SP 2010 is good or bad.
Records Management in SharePoint 2007
Three major problems in SharePoint 2007 records management that SharePoint 2010 attempts to address include:
- To preserve content as records and to stop them from being deleted they had to be sent to a records library within the Records Center.
- For different types of content you had to set up different records libraries in the Records Center.
- It does not support a useable fileplan hierarchy. The folders have no functionality, so records did not inherit rules or metadata from the folders.
Records Management in SharePoint 2010
For these three problems, SharePoint 2010 offers three solutions:
1. Records Center
The first is Records Center. Introduced in SharePoint 2007, it facilitated records management in the traditional way by moving content classified as a record to a secure place.
In SharePoint 2010 this facility is still there, but users are also offered the possibility of classifying content as a record, and leave it in the place it was created.
The result is that users of SharePoint 2010 can choose between centralized management and dispersed records management.
2. Fileplans
With SharePoint 2010, the Records Center supports fileplan hierarchies and in doing so, deals with the problem of inherited rules and metadata.
SharePoint 2010 uses the File Plan to apply an organization’s official retention schedule. Appropriate permissions are applied throughout the file plan and, in SharePoint 2010, different retention requirements can be applied at each file plan level.
3. Folders
Folders have no functionality in 2007, with users avoiding them in most situations and using metadata columns instead. For 2010, folders are able to act as parents to any child objects with metadata applied at folder level, so that the child objects can inherit that information.
Who Uses SharePoint for Records Management?
Research carried out by AIIM (news. site) this summer that shows that few enterprises are really looking at the records management element of SharePoint at all.
However, it also showed that there would be a considerable increase in the use of that element of SharePoint over the coming 12 to 18 months.
SharePoint use in the enterprise
Continue reading this article:
Email It
