Microsoft Records Management Team Blog

Announcing the DoD 5015.2 Resource Kit for SharePoint Server 2007

[Cross-posted from the SharePoint Team Blog.]

Back in May of last year, we announced that MOSS 2007 had passed the U.S. government's DoD 5015.2 certification. Now, all of the work that was done to achieve that important milestone has been packaged and released as a resource kit.

The DoD 5015.2 Resource Kit is intended only for customers, who are required to run their records management system in a DoD 5015.2 Chapter 2 certified state. In case you're wondering, we currently have no plans to provide support for DoD 5015.2 Chapter 4 (classified records).

However, the Resource Kit is not intended for customers, who would like to enhance the records management functionality of MOSS 2007 with particular 5015.2 oriented features but are not required to run their system in a certified configuration. Alternatively, sample code and documentation will be available shortly via the MSDN Dev Center for MOSS 2007 for the most frequently requested features such as:

• Generating a Unique ID
• Display search results in Grid View
• Referencing and Linking - Using a secondary table to maintain the relationship
• Referencing and Linking - Using the asset picker
• Referencing and Linking - Using a custom field to display the relationship
• Create Document Library from a list item
• Put multiple items on Hold using SPQuery
• Custom expiration formula based on metadata (2 parts)
• Custom expiration formula based on metadata (cont.)
• Creating a custom router & extracting date received (2 parts)
• Creating a custom router & extracting date received (cont)
• Prevent record modification but allow metadata modification in event handler
• Prevent record modification but allow metadata modification by overriding upload page
• Programmatically defaulting/inheriting a field value
• Using ProcessBatchData to batch update list items
• Using Metadata tags to route documents into document libraries
• Create a record category programmatically (2 parts)
• Create a record category programmatically (cont)
• Routing content to a record category based on a metadata value

Officially, the DoD 5015.2 Resource Kit for SharePoint Server 2007 is now available to customers through our partner and Microsoft Consulting Service (MCS) channels. The reason for requiring partner/MCS involvement is that DoD implementations are not as simple as a "double-click installation." They require deep understanding of records management practices as well as business process and policy requirements. In order to successfully implement a DoD 5015.2 certified solution based on MOSS 2007, customers should work with their respective Microsoft account managers to engage a partner that has been trained on the DoD 5015.2 Resource Kit. Partners may download the Resource Kit's source code for free via MS Connect's DoD 5015.2 Resource Kit Source Code download site.

Also on the download site is a DoD 5015.2 Resource Kit Installer that partners as well as customers can download only for evaluation purposes and not for production use. This additional download provides a way for evaluators to learn about the DoD 5015.2 oriented records management capabilities provided by the Resource Kit while deciding which features, if not all, will be suitable for addressing their organization's requirements. [Caution: This is an unsigned debug build of the Installer for early preview purposes. The official Microsoft signed version of the Installer will be available on Microsoft.com's Download Center within a couple of weeks.]

For the latest answers to frequently asked questions about the DoD 5015.2 Resource Kit for SharePoint Server 2007, go to http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/capabilities/ecm/dod5015.mspx.

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We're taking a break...

We are taking a break from posting on this site because all of the topics that we had wanted to blog about have now been posted. Moreover, Records Management (RM) is a feature area that is part of SharePoint Server’s larger set of Enterprise Content Management capabilities, which also include Document Management (DM) and Web Content Management (WCM). It’s very likely that we will merge this blog with the ECM Team Blog. If you have RM related topics that you’d like to see us blog about, please leave a comment here.

In the meantime, you can participate in community Q&A and discussion in the SharePoint ECM forum at http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1213&SiteID=1.

<Lawrence />

E-mail Records Management Part 4: Quota Management and Sending E-mail to the Records Center

Greetings, everyone! In this post, we are going to conclude our discussion of e-mail records management by talking about some of the other policies that can apply to Microsoft Exchange 2007’s managed folders. If you haven’t read the previous posts on e-mail management, I suggest that you start from the beginning.

In this post, we’ll start by talking about mailbox quota management. In the “old days,” quota management was all about enforcing one size quota on an entire mailbox (e.g. all users have 1GB of mail storage). With managed folders, an Exchange administrator can set a quota on each folder. When a particular managed folder is over its quota, Outlook will notify the user directly in the client. There is no need to send an “over quota” e-mail, and, once again, this is an example of the Office user interface educating users about corporate policy.

For instance, suppose that a managed folder, “Non-Work Related,” has a 25 MB quota. When the Non-Work Related folder is over its quota in a user’s mailbox, it is flagged in red, and the policy statement alerts the user:

Note: Red circles were added for clarity.

In this example, the IT-related goal is to minimize the amount of corporate resources dedicated to non-work related e-mail while still giving end users a lot of control over their own inboxes.

While this approach is no panacea, it is a way of encouraging good user behavior. For instance, I know many of us (myself included) take the following approach to managing our mailbox quotas: Sort the inbox by mail size and delete the largest items without regard to corporate retention policy. Folder quotas are a more precise tool to help IT departments manage storage costs while reducing the impact on corporate retention policy.

Now I’d like to switch gears and describe a policy related to managed folders than many readers of this blog have been waiting for: sending e-mail to a records repository. Any managed folder can be configured such that all e-mail sent to that folder will be journaled off to a records repository, such as a SharePoint Records Center.

What does this mean? E-mail messages and their attachments are sent off to SharePoint along with an extract of their metadata (e.g. From, To, CC, BCC, Subject). They are then passed through the same records routing framework that documents from SharePoint go through when they are sent to a Records Center site. By configuring the Records Routing list, records managers can route e-mail messages to particular document libraries based upon a label associated with each managed folder. For example, all e-mail dragged to an “Agreements with Partners” managed folder might be routed to a “Contracts” document library. Once in this library, the e-mail would pick up the same Contract metadata schema and expiration policy as Microsoft Word contracts stored in that library. This allows for the management of e-mail records alongside documents and other types of records using a submittal method that end users already use every day (i.e. dragging and dropping to folders).

One obvious question about this process is, “What about metadata on the e-mail record?” On the one hand, e-mail has a larger amount of system-generated metadata than documents do (To, From, CC, BCC, Subject). However, unlike SharePoint, Exchange and Outlook don’t have a way to collect custom metadata on an item (e.g. “Date this contract was signed.”). By taking the e-mail out of Exchange and into SharePoint, we expose the ability to collect a rich amount of metadata about the items. Not to mention, we also have other advanced records management functionality: complex disposition, workflows, and holds are just a few examples.

How does the user enter that metadata? To decrease the tax on the end user during the submission process, we don’t collect the metadata immediately when the user drags the e-mail to a managed folder. Instead, SharePoint queues the submitted messages in a holding zone. After a specified period of time, SharePoint sends one e-mail to the submitter asking him to fill out the missing metadata on all pending items that he owns. We then provide spreadsheet-like UI for bulk entering metadata:

Organizations can choose how often they want to collect the metadata, and it’s really dependent on the individual business process. Highly regulated organizations with lots of records may send out the e-mail reminders often. Other companies may ask their employees to spend a few minutes on Friday updating the metadata for the e-mail records submitted that week.

Getting users to enter metadata is always a challenge in any records management project, especially e-mail. We’ve designed this process to minimize the impact on the user’s everyday work and to make the bulk entering of metadata as easy as possible.

Of course, if there is no need to collect extra metadata, the email message is sent to the correct document library without any further user intervention.

So that concludes our 4-part tour of e-mail records management. As always, keep the questions and comments coming. We only hit the tip of the iceberg with regards to Exchange 2007’s compliance features. I encourage you to check out a couple Exchange blog posts (here and here) for more information. Their blog is targeted to the Exchange administrator, but there is still good information for records managers in there.

Thanks,

Adam Harmetz

Program Manager

E-mail Records Management, Part 3: E-mail Retention

In my previous post, I described how organizations can define a set of e-mail classifications (i.e. managed folders) and how end users can use those folders to classify content. In this post, I’ll describe one of the main uses of this classification system: e-mail retention policies.

I mentioned in the last post that one of the first steps of an e-mail management plan is for a records manager to create a list of all the types of e-mail content within an organization. During this process, a records manager should also define the retention periods for each class of e-mail.

For instance, a records manager may decide that “Research and Development Design” e-mails should be kept for three years and then deleted. She may also define a broader and more generic class of content called “Long Term Business Need,” which might have the policy that e-mail must be kept for five years. Generally, the policies for e-mail will closely match the retention rules for managing documents in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. For example, both product specification documents and e-mail messages in the category “Research and Development Design” would be kept for three years and then deleted.

As you might expect, these e-mail retention rules are made concrete when a managed folder is assigned a retention policy for the mail inside it. This is done on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and the rules are enforced by Exchange, not Outlook. This allows an IT department to centralize the management and enforcement of the rules (e.g. deletion of the e-mail) without having to configure an application on each end user desktop.

The types of retention rules that can be defined are fairly broad. The event that triggers the expiration of an e-mail is based upon an auto-captured piece of metadata, such as the date the e-mail was sent. Exchange provides both move and delete as possible expiration actions (more on that below).

E-mail retention rules can also vary depending on the type of content in the folder. For instance, voice-mail messages might only be kept for 60 days, while e-mail message might be kept for a year. (As an aside, this allows policy decisions to be made based upon the medium and not just on the content itself. There was a really interesting comment thread that talked about whether that’s appropriate).

In addition, a records manager can also specify policies on non-managed folders, such as the Inbox and Sent Items folder. There is also a “default policy” that will be applied to all user-created folders. Generally, these policies should have a retention period shorter than the periods on the managed folders. This will encourage users to classify e-mail that they want to keep by moving it out of their Inbox and into a long term managed folder.

As it’s been described so far, the feature has only addressed the pure compliance scenario: non-important e-mail will be deleted; important e-mail will be kept for as long as there is a business justification for it. However, if we stopped there, we’d have introduced a major issue with our approach. This is the “So what did you do with my e-mail?” problem. Any e-mail records management solution should be sensitive to end users’ need to know what’s happening to their e-mail messages. We’ve done a couple things to address this.

Sharp-eyed readers of my previous post will notice one of the primary things we’ve done to make people comfortable with e-mail retention. We’ve provided records managers with a way to communicate the corporate policy on a folder. Within Outlook 2007, every folder displays a policy statement provided by the records manager:

Just like the Information Policy Bar in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, this policy statement supports the communication of corporate policy directly within the Office applications. This is valuable irrespective of our policy enforcement features. Instead of having to visit a hard-to-find corporate intranet site or watch a video, users can learn about corporate compliance directly within the application they work with everyday.

Customers can also use a “recycle bin” approach as a backstop to prevent the accidental deletion of important e-mail. Before deleting an e-mail, Exchange can move it to a “Cleanup Review folder,” where it will sit for short amount of time (generally thirty days). With this approach, the user can visit her Cleanup Review folder, see what’s about to be deleted, and – if appropriate – move a particularly important e-mail to a managed folder with a longer term retention policy.

As you can see, our approach to managing e-mail is similar to our approach to managing documents in the Office SharePoint Server collaborative spaces. All files are classified based upon their content, and then an expiration policy is applied unique to the classification. In Office SharePoint Server document management, we focus more on user-collected metadata. With Exchange, we only have auto-populated metadata to work with. But it’s the same general concept for both.

In the next post, we’ll conclude our discussion of managed folders and talk about a couple of other types of policies that can apply to e-mail. Until then, keep the blog comments and questions coming!

Thanks,

Adam Harmetz

Program Manager

E-mail Records Management, Part 2

In the previous post, we covered the basics of what’s involved in e-mail records management and why it’s important. Now it’s time to get into some of the details of our approach to the e-mail records management problem.

In this post, I’m going to discuss the e-mail classification challenge. I’ll show how Exchange 2007 allows records managers to specify a corporate classification structure for e-mail and how that structure can be customized for individual departments or users. I’ll also discuss how information workers can view that structure and use it to classify their e-mail according to corporate policies.

The first step in e-mail records management is not a technological problem at all. Instead, a records manager needs to examine her organization and create a list of all the different types of communications in it. This work is very similar to the file plan building process for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 described in our documentation. For example, records managers could define e-mail types like Research and Development, Human Resources, and Non-Work Related.

This “file plan for e-mail” will be very specific to each organization. Depending on the business and e-mail retention needs of an organization, it may have a very broad set of e-mail types (e.g. “Long Term General Business” and “Non-work related”) or have a very specific set of types (e.g. “Human Resources – China” and “Accounting – Sarbanes Oxley Compliance”). The scopes of the classifications often depend on the types of policies that need to be applied to e-mail (more on that in later posts).

Once they are defined, each e-mail classification is mapped to a managed folder in Exchange 2007, which is similar to a content type in SharePoint. Managed folders appear to users simply as folders in their mailbox. They are a way to expose the corporate e-mail classifications to end users. Since the folder concept is generally familiar to all information workers who use e-mail, the corporate taxonomy is now modeled in a form that users can easily understand.

To be concrete, here’s an example of e-mail classifications that a user might see in Outlook after managed folders have been deployed:

Managed folders can be customized to meet the needs of each user. This can be done in two ways. First, although there might be dozens of managed folders defined within an organization, they can be configured so that each user only sees the managed folders appropriate to him or her. For instance, a product developer in the R&D department won’t see the Human Resources managed folder. This can either be configured ahead of time by the records manager based upon group membership, or an organization can deploy an interface that allows users to specify which managed folders they want to see.

Another way that managed folders can be customized is that users can create their own folder structure within a managed folder. For example, if a records manager has defined “Research and Development” as a type of e-mail content and has created and deployed a Research and Development managed folder to all users in the R&D arm of her organization, individual users can create their own folder structure within the Research and Development folder. So a researcher working on Project Vienna and Project Fiji could create subfolders within the Research and Development managed folder to separate the mail for each of those projects:

In this way, users can create a folder structure that reflects how they perform their everyday work while still conforming to the e-mail classifications required by records managers.

How do users classify content into managed folders? As we’ve already seen, the managed folders appear just like any other folders in the user’s mailbox. They can use any familiar method to move items between folders. For example, users can simply drag and drop e-mail between folders, use copy/paste, or right click on a mail item and select “Move to Folder.” Users can also set up rules to automatically move or copy items when they arrive. For instance, all e-mail from a certain distribution list or person can automatically be copied to a particular managed folder:

Finally, the new Outlook 2007 ribbon makes it easy to classify e-mail using a simple drop down menu.

In this way, users have an entire corporate classification system exposed within their Outlook environment. The experience is customized to each individual user, who can submit and classify e-mail in any way that he or she feels comfortable. We felt very strongly that, in order to allow customers to successfully manage e-mail, we needed to provide users with a variety of ways of accomplishing their tasks using tools that they are already familiar with.

Of course, classifying all this content doesn’t completely solve the e-mail management problem. Organizations have to take action based upon the classifications. There are a variety of out of the box policies that can be configured on a managed folder. For example, each managed folder can have a unique expiration policy or size quota. And, of course, e-mail submitted to managed folders can be sent off to a SharePoint Records Center where it is retained along with other types of content. We’ll be talking about all of these options in the next few posts.

Thanks for reading,

Adam Harmetz

Program Manager

Microsoft IT Showcase Technical Case Study: Streamlining Records Management Using SharePoint Server 2007 Workflow - now available

   Overview

The Microsoft Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) Records Management team is responsible for tracking the location and contents of some two million boxes of documents stored by Microsoft employees. The LCA Records Management team created an efficient tracking solution that provides employees with easy access to records information and offsets the need to handle all box inventory queries manually. Building on the power of Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 and Office InfoPath 2007, the solution uses forms and workflows to automate the collection of inventory data. The solution increases accuracy, enforces business rules, and simplifies access to collected inventory information, helping the LCA team to scale easily and manage the growth and demand for document retention companywide.

   Details at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itshowcase/content/srmusps07.mspx.

   <Lawrence />

AIIM Records Management Survey

Happy New Year, everyone!

We’ll return to our talk on email records management later this week, but I wanted to point you to a recent AIIM survey on records management and compliance.  Over 800 organizations answered questions about their records management practices, and there are some pretty detailed results.  Overall, I think it shows the growth opportunity for the entire industry, as well as the need for an easy to use, comprehensive strategy and solution.

John Mancini is the president of AIMM and coordinator for the survey.  You can access the results and look at his comments via his blog.

Thanks!

Adam Harmetz

Program Manager

Email Records Management, Part 1

Hi everyone!  Now that Vista, Exchange, and the Office System are available to businesses, we thought we’d switch gears on this blog.  So far, the blog has focused on the records management capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.  However, around the office, we always talk about compliance and records management as spanning the entire information lifecycle and not just one particular product or service.  When we were researching customer needs for the 2007 release, one of the themes we constantly heard was that there is a need to manage all types of content – no matter where it lives – and a need to integrate various products together for a complete end-to-end experience.

E-mail is a key type of content in organizations. Therefore, the next couple posts will focus on managing the information contained in corporate e-mail.  We’ll introduce some of the compliance and records management features in Microsoft Exchange 2007 and Microsoft Outlook 2007.  Of course, we’ll be sure to mention the tight integration with MOSS 2007 as well.

At first glance, e-mail is a pretty strange place to talk about records management.  When most people think of managing corporate records, they think of archiving signed contracts, financial statements, and the like.  They don’t think of trying to manage ad hoc communications like e-mail.

Increasingly, though, e-mail is where a lot of an organization’s important information lives.  A recent AIIM survey showed that over 70% of information workers spend a fifth of their time or more on e-mail related tasks.  Certainly here at Microsoft we live in an e-mail centric world.  On average, over 3 million e-mail messages are sent internally within Microsoft every day!

For many organizations, what used to be communicated in written memos or other easily archivable formats is now being sent as e-mail.  Since e-mail is where business is being conducted, important information that needs to be retained is stored there as well.

What’s more, the need to manage e-mail has been emphasized in recent headlines.  For instance, this year marked a landmark case in electronic records retention: Perelman vs. Morgan Stanley.  In this case, Morgan Stanley was heavily punished by the judge for consistently failing to produce e-mail records during the discovery process.  On several occasions, employees at Morgan Stanley found tape backups of e-mail records related to the case even after the company signed statements stating that they had turned over all relevant records.  Morgan Stanley had no consistent process in place for managing the flow of information in e-mail, and this could end up costing the firm hundreds of millions of dollars.

Flashy court cases aren’t the only wake up call, though.  The oft-mentioned changes to Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure finally codify the requirement to manage electronic information.  Specifically, these new rules focus on the eDiscovery process and they make it clear that companies must have a policy for managing all types of electronic information, regardless of where it is stored.  If you want to learn more, our partner Iron Mountain has an excellent whitepaper on the new rules.

And yet, in a recent ARMA survey, 43% of respondents have no plan for managing e-mail records.  So we have a situation where a lot of information is being generated, there is a new and urgent need to manage that information flow, and most companies don’t have a plan yet.

It was with this customer problem in mind that we developed a solution to the e-mail management problem.  As we describe the solution in the next few blog posts, we’ll be talking about things like:

·         How end users can classify e-mail messages according to a corporate schema

·         How e-mail can be retained and then ultimately deleted based on its classification

·         How storage quotas can be enforced on individual folders (e.g. this folder is limited to 200MB)

·         How important e-mail can be sent to a SharePoint Records Center – directly from the Outlook client

·         How Exchange and Outlook search can be used to search for e-mail during the eDiscovery process

To a certain degree, managing e-mail is very different from managing other corporate records.  The sheer volume of information requires broad strokes and less attention to each individual item.  Process and rules becomes very important.

However, even though there are some differences, records are records because of their content, not their format. So we’ve made sure that the e-mail management features we’ll describe in the next few posts align with the “big picture” we outlined in the early posts on this blog.  Themes like “low tax on the end user” and “low deployment costs” will run through our e-mail experience as well. 

Thanks for reading and stay tuned!

Adam Harmetz

Program Manager

Compliance Features in the 2007 Microsoft Office System

Hi everyone,

I wanted to point you to an excellent whitepaper that discusses compliance across the entire 2007 Microsoft Office System.  Rather than talk about specific certifications Microsoft is pursuing (like DoD 5015.2), the paper explains the other side of compliance.  It provides an overview of the compliance space and showcases the tools that Microsoft provides to help customers comply with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley.  Certainly many of the features on this blog are mentioned in the paper, but there are plenty of other products and features in there as well (Excel Services, Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and a lot more)

Here’s a summary of the paper:

“Compliance Features in the 2007 Microsoft Office System” showcases compliance-related features and extensibility opportunities within the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and demonstrates how the Office system can help you meet the demands of regulatory compliance. Out-of-the-box, the 2007 Office system provides many of the fundamental components required to support compliance regulations, such as auditing, records management, and data security. However, some degree of development and customization is necessary to tailor regulation-compliant solutions for particular organizations and environments. This paper provides examples of extending the platform to build custom compliance solutions for the financial services, healthcare, and accounting fields. The target audience includes developers, technical architects, and technical decision makers interested in delivering business solutions that leverage and extend the compliance-related feature set of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

Joanna Bichsel, the author of the paper, also has a blog post about it.

Happy Reading!

Adam Harmetz

Program Manager

The 2007 Office System ships!

We want to make sure everyone has heard that we’ve completed work on the 2007 release of the Microsoft Office System, including all of the Records Management features we’ve been talking about on this blog! (Below are a few links to press articles about the product launch.) The product will be available to enterprise customers on November 30, 2007.

This represents a huge milestone for our team, and we’re looking forward to the conversations that will ensue here once the community starts using these products – especially about where the Records Management team should focus our efforts for the next version of the Office system, which we’ll be starting work on soon. :-)

Thanks for reading!

- Ethan Gur-esh, Program Manager.

Some press coverage:

• http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2052056,00.asp
• http://news.com.com/Microsoft+wraps+up+work+on+new+Office/2100-1016_3-6132678.html
• http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/291194_office06.html
• http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/003087.html

DoD 5015.2 Certification for Office SharePoint Server 2007

Hi everyone!  My name is Adam Harmetz and I work on the Records Management team here in Redmond.  I met many of you at the ARMA conference a couple weeks ago.  I had a great time there demoing Office SharePoint Server 2007 and getting feedback from everyone.

One of the questions that we often heard at the Microsoft ARMA booth was, “Is Office SharePoint Server 2007 going to be certified against the DoD 5015.2 standard?”  I wanted to take some time today to elaborate on our certification plans.

First off, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the standard, DoD 5015.2 is a records management certification managed by the Joint Interoperability Test Command of the United States Department of Defense.  You can visit their website for more information about the criteria and testing procedures.  Generally, though, there are two different types of DoD 5015.2 certifications: Chapter 2 and Chapter 4.  Chapter 2 contains the mandatory criteria that are required by all records management applications used by United States government agencies.  Chapter 4 is specific just to applications that process classified records. 

Chapter 2 is the more widely used part of the DoD 5015.2 standard and Microsoft is pursuing Chapter 2 certification only.

Even outside the US Government, Chapter 2 is looked upon as a very comprehensive “fitness test” for a records management application.  As such, many companies and organizations will only consider purchasing DoD 5015.2 Chapter 2 certified records management applications.  By requiring DoD 5015.2 certification, they can ensure that all the products they consider can be extended and configured to meet even the most serious of records management needs.

The DoD 5015.2 standard is widely used outside the United States as well.  Many non-US companies require DoD 5015.2 certification and the DoD 5015.2 criteria have had a significant impact on many of the non-US standards (e.g. MOREQ).  In a previous post, Ethan has made a few comments about why we haven’t announced other certification initiatives.

Microsoft is working on a Records Center Add-on Pack for Office SharePoint Server which will provide the additional functionality to meet the DoD 5015.2 criteria.  The add-on pack will be freely available to all customers with Office SharePoint Server 2007, so anyone can take advantage of the new features. 

Microsoft is slotted to take the DoD 5015.2 certification test on May 14, 2007 and we plan to release the add-on pack shortly after the certification process is complete. 

We are looking forward to talking about what functionality we are adding with the add-on pack in later posts.  Since the pack is built entirely on top of our existing Records Center, it’s a great showcase for how the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Records Center can be extended to meet specific customer needs.

Thanks for reading!

Adam Harmetz

Program Manager

The Business Side -- Is there a separate "Compliance / RM edition" of Office SharePoint Server 2007?

There are many challenges in getting an RM department and an IT department to work together: cultural issues, procedural issues, and more. But one of the first challenges for working with IT is simply acquiring RM software -- in many organizations,  hardware & software purchases, including systems used for RM, are accounted for in the IT department's budget. And the metrics that IT often uses to make purchasing decisions usually don't favor RM considerations. (This may be changing thanks to the increased importance of compliance for many organizations, but it's likely to remain a challenge for Records Managers for the near future.)

Fortunately, organizations that choose Office SharePoint Server 2007 won’t have to deal with this disconnect. :-)

We've stated on this blog from the beginning that for a records management program to succeed in an organization, all of the organization's content management systems need to have appropriate RM capabilities. For that reason, all of the Records Management capabilities described in this blog are available in Office SharePoint Server 2007. There will NOT be separate RM or “compliance” editions of Office SharePoint Server specific to records management.

This can have a major impact on how records managers and IT departments justify investments in RM software. IT departments have several reasons to deploy the Office SharePoint server 2007 in addition to its Records Management abilities. (Here’s a link to the "Top 10 benefits of Office SharePoint Server". Only item #3 talks about Records Management.) So within your organization the RM group won’t be the only people asking IT to deploy this system. And from the IT department’s perspective, the “Return on Investment” for RM within Office SharePoint Server 2007 is much more palatable – you aren’t requiring them to deploy an RM application in addition to their Content Management systems; and the business benefits include more than reduced legal & regulatory risk.

So not only can the 2007 release help you be more successful at implementing records management programs in your organizations, but you'll also have an easier time getting IT to acquire & deploy this system in the first place.

Thanks for reading!

- Ethan Gur-esh, Program Manager.

Records Management team Halloween costume

This might seem a bit off-topic, but we just had to share some photos of our team's Halloween costume this year.

Every year at Microsoft, many employees and teams dress up for Halloween and welcome trick-or-treaters to the Microsoft campus. This year, the Office "Enterprise Content Management" team (the group within Office product team that includes the Records Management team) decided that our team costume should reflect our recent experience at the ARMA Conference, particularly the warm reception that I personally received resulting from our blogging efforts. (See the "People read our blog!" section of this post for more details.)

As such, we thought it would be appropriate to share some photos of the team costume with all of you.

Here is a picture of two members of our testing team (JD Klaka and Mike Dalton), showing their "Ethan / RecMan blog fan" t-shirts:

Here are several members of the team surprising me by with the team costume. I'm on the far left, and those who saw me at the ARMA conference will note that I'm not usually that shade of red ;-) :

Finally, here is a photo of several members of the Office Document Lifecycle team in costume:

(Pictured, Left to right: Lera Pakhomova, Jason Cahill, Mike Dalton, Ethan Gur-esh, JD Klaka, Eilene Hao, Adam Harmetz, Zach Rosenfield, Jon Rosenberg.)

Thanks for reading, and Happy Halloween to all those who celebrate it!
- Ethan Gur-esh,  Program Manager.  

ARMA Conference Podcasts

As part of the outreach activities for ARMA 2006, several conference speakers & participants recorded podcasts about topics of interest for Records Managers. (Kudos to the ARMA conference organizers for this effort – this is a really innovative way to help inform people who couldn’t attend. :-) )

Tina Torres, Microsoft’s Corporate Records Manager, recorded a podcast about what Microsoft is seeing and doing in the RM space with the 2007 releases.

Tina’s podcast can be found here.

The rest of the ARMA podcasts can be found here.

- Ethan Gur-esh, Program Manager.

ARMA International Conference 2006

What a week! Most of the Records Management team is now back in Redmond from the ARMA International Conference in San Antonio, Texas, and I want to talk a bit about the event for the benefit of everyone who wasn’t able to attend.

First and foremost, a few acknowledgements:

1. I would like to thank ARMA International on behalf of Microsoft for hosting a great and well-executed conference, and allowing us to participate as technology sponsor. It was a real pleasure for us to be involved, both as a company and as the individuals who got to spend a few days in San Antonio, TX.
2. I personally would like to thank all of the Microsoft people, both from the product teams, the sales & marketing groups, and our Legal and Corporate Affairs group for participating at the show. It was a major time commitment from some busy people, and it was really appreciated. :-)

With those thanks covered, on to a summary of the event…

Microsoft booth at the ARMA Expo

Despite a sub-optimal location for the Microsoft booth on the tradeshow floor (the best floor spots are usually the ones near the food/drinks ;-) ), our booth saw non-stop traffic from the beginning to the very end. Attendance was so strong that most of our people worked double-shifts to help us talk to everyone. We even ran out of Office SharePoint Server & Exchange 2007 Beta DVDs… and we’d brought a lot of them to the show. Here are the links to download the Betas for those who missed out:

• Office SharePoint Server 2007 Beta: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/
• Exchange Server 2007 Beta: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/preview/

It was great to see so many people interested in what we were doing, asking really thoughtful questions, and responding so positively to the 2007 release and our demonstrations. The conceptual model of “collaborative spaces” vs. “records spaces” that we first outlined on this blog resonated with many people, including practitioners, other vendors, and even members of the ARMA leadership.

I’m glad our product people and our corporate practitioners were there – I think that the attendees really appreciated our being able to have conversations from both of those perspectives.

And it was clear that there’s been a real “word-of-mouth effect” for Microsoft’s Records Management efforts in our 2007 releases – we had many attendees come by saying that “I heard from others that you guys are doing big things in RM now and that I have to come see your demo.” So thanks to everyone who is spreading the word!

Our “Technology Spotlight Session” on Tuesday, October 24

In addition to our booth at the ARMA expo, Tina Torres and I also presented a “Technology Spotlight Session” on Tuesday, October 24 about the 2007 release and our experiences using it internally at Microsoft. (Here are the links to the presentation, which has been split into 3 PPT files: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

We were blown away by the attendance for this session! The ballroom where we gave the presentation was very full, and it’s quite a large room. Judging from the feedback we got during and after the session, it was really well-received. (On several occasions we were told that “it’s clear you guys really understand this space!”.) “Telling the story” from both the practitioner and the product perspective really struck a chord with the conference attendees.

People read our blog!

One other takeaway from the event was that this blog has been a valuable resource for the Records Management community. We’ve had raw “page view” statistics about the blog for a while (it actually ranks in the top 6% of all Microsoft blogs by audience size), but this event was one of the first times we could gauge how well it was serving Records Managers. It was really gratifying to hear so many people who came to the booth saying “It’s great to meet you. We read the blog regularly!” When we started this blog we weren’t really sure if it would be a good way to reach the Records Management community… but it’s great to know that it has.

And while we’re on that topic… probably the most surprising takeaway from the conference was the amount of personal recognition that I received. (The running joke among the Microsoft participants after the show was that next year we should give away “Ethan bobble-head dolls” instead of Hostess Twinkies. :-) )

I should firstly say that I’m very flattered and grateful. At the same time I’d like to clarify that there are a lot of people on the Microsoft Records Management team that deserve the credit that was being given to me. It’s been a real pleasure working on the team building these products for the last few years, and especially fun to be the “public face” for the team now that we’re so close to releasing the products. But there are many people on the team who’ve worked over the past few years to both understand the Records Management space and to build the products… I take every piece of kind personal feedback as a “team” compliment, and will relay those to them accordingly.

Also, if people now think we understand Records Management, a lot of people deserve credit for making that happen. First and foremost, the RM department in Microsoft’s Legal & Corporate Affairs spent many hours helping to educate us early on and give us feedback, as did many other customers who participated in Microsoft Office’s early adopter programs. (I can’t mention specific names of those organizations, but they know who they are. :-) ) So I wanted to thank them one more time for all of their participation in this effort.

We want your feedback!

Finally, I want to ask all of you who were at the conference for your feedback. This was our first time at ARMA as a vendor, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on what went well with our booth & session, where we can do better next year, etc. A few attendees shared some comments with us during the event -- please keep your feedback coming!

Thanks for reading, and thanks again to ARMA and its membership for a really great conference & week!

- Ethan Gur-esh, Program Manager.