MOSS receives DoD 5015.2 certification

For those who have been building or evaluating records management solutions using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), you may be aware that MOSS was recently submitted to take the DoD 5015.2 certification test. Adam Harmetz explained why the DoD 5015.2 certification might be relevant for some customers in a post on the Records Management Team Blog a while ago.

Good news - it was just announced that MOSS has passed the test, and received DoD 5015.2 Certification. Hurrah! You can now see MOSS on the Joint Interoperability Test Command list of certified records management applications (meaning that it's official :-)). The capabilities will be made available via an add-on later this year.

The solution has been developed by using the supported MOSS object model - so in theory, anyone could have built the solution given enough time. I think that this is a good example of the power and capability of the solutions that can be created by building on the MOSS platform.  Whilst Microsoft chose to address this particular US standard because it is widely recognised, hopefully this shows that MOSS-based solutions can be adapted to meet differing standards. For example, in Europe the upcoming MoReq2 standards look as though they will be increasingly important in the near future. I wonder whether there are any partners looking to build a similar 'compliance pack' for MoReq? (Just my speculation by the way :-)).

If you've not heard of DoD 5015.2 yet, or you do not have a specific need to be compliant with that standard, you probably don't need to think about installing the components.

[UPDATE 5th June 2007]: There is a great white paper that was published by the partner that developed the DoD 5015.2 certification solution for MOSS, describing the new functionality that will be added, here: Military Grade Compliance for SharePoint 2007 (published in January 2007).

There is also now a post about the certification by Adam Harmetz, ECM Program Manager on the ECM Team Blog here.