Deltascheme

Release date for SharePoint 2010

Clive Walker — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:57:29 +0000

To listen to the launch you can virtually join Microsoft and register for the event on 12 May 2010 at 11am EST. Register on the following link…

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx.

About Deltascheme

Deltascheme is a leading provider of business and technical consultancy for Electronic Content Management (ECM) and Business Process Management (BPM) solutions based on Microsoft Technologies. We can help you to implement your new SharePoint Server system by providing:

Consultancy to define your business requirements
Professional Services to design, install and configure your system
Data migration tools to re‐classify & import your legacy content
Solutions to enable paper content to be scanned into the system
Services to deliver standard forms and workflow processes
Expertise to integrate SharePoint with your existing applications (e.g. Kofax)

Records Management in SharePoint 2010

Clive Walker — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:03:53 +0000

Records Centre – A Place for Hierarchy, Driven by Metadata

The Records Centre was introduced in 2007 as a SharePoint site that served as a conventional records archive. Content from all over the enterprise can be submitted to a Records Centre and then routed to the appropriate place where it picks up the right permissions and policies, such as expiration and auditing.
For SharePoint 2010, Microsoft know it’s important to continue to invest here and add even more “traditional” archive features. When looking at the broad swath of features they had to choose from, their goals here really focused on providing features that allow you to extract the most value out of an archive and find the data you need. For instance, here are a few of the new features in a SharePoint 2010 Records Center:

Document ID: Every document can be assigned a unique identifier, which stays with the document even when it’s archived. This allows records to be easily referenced by an ID no matter where the document moves.
Multi-Stage Retention: Retention policies can have multiple stages, allowing you to specify the entire document lifecycle as one policy (e.g. review Contracts every year, and delete after 7 years)
Per-Item Audit Reports: You can generate a customized audit report about an individual record.
Hierarchal File Plans: You can create deep, hierarchal folder structures and manage retention at each folder in the hierarchy (or inherit from parent folders).
File Plan Report: You can generate status reports showing the number of items in each stage of the file plan, along with a rollup of the retention policies on each node in the plan.

Here’s the home page of the Records Center in SharePoint 2010 for a fictional government agency, the Joint Task Force. Notice that the home page is a place for records managers to educate the organization on compliance policy, as well as a place to look up a record by its document identifier.

In addition to adding these traditional records management features to the archive, Microsoft product designers have made a big bet on the power of metadata to dive 21st century electronic records management. This manifests itself in several ways in the SharePoint archive:

Taxonomy and Centralized Content Types: The archive will be a consumer of enterprise-wide taxonomies and content types, ensuring consistency and context transfer between the collaborative spaces and the archive.
Content Organizer: The records router can use metadata to route incoming documents to the right place in the hierarchical file plan. For instance, it enables you to automatically enforce rules on content that is submitted, like “If a Purchase Agreement is tagged with Project Alpha, send to the Alpha Contracts subfolder and apply that’s folder retention policy to the item.”
Virtual Folders: The file plan is a great way to manage a repository but often time isn’t what you want to use to navigate and find the content you are looking for. The SharePoint 2010 Records Center makes use of a new feature called metadata based navigation, which allows you to expose key metadata as virtual folders:

Notice that end users discover content in this Records Center by navigating virtual folders based upon metadata properties on the records.

This bet on metadata is all about empowering the end user, thus increasing the chance of successful adoption of the RM system. Instead of choosing a complicated node in a file plan, submitters just fill out a few pieces of useful metadata and they’ll use that metadata when they need to find the content again.

In Place Records Management – Injecting Records Management in the Content Creation Experience

Microsoft have made a huge effort in 2010 to enable you to do effective records management in collaborative spaces. Auditing, Retention, Expiration, Reporting, Records Workflows, eDiscovery, Legal Hold and Recordization are all features you can use in collaborative space as you are striking a balance between SharePoint’s value to end users and the need for information governance.

Holding all of this together is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 called In Place Records Management. This allows certain SharePoint documents (or blogs, wikis, web pages, and list items) to be declared records. The system can prevent such records from being deleted or edited, if necessary by your organization’s definition of what a record is:

Note that some of the documents have locks, implying to the user that they are dealing with records. When selecting a record, the UI for editing and deleting the item is disabled.

This recordization process can be done either manually, as part of a larger process in a workflow, or as a scheduled part of a document’s retention (e.g. after 2 years). The key here is that, when declared a record, the content doesn’t move to an archive – it stays where it is so the end users can still find and interact with the content.

Once declared, the system knows about an item’s record status, so you can do things such as create different retention policies for records or use record state when defining workflows in SharePoint Designer. Microsoft also enable a programmability model so you can perform custom processes and policies upon recordization to meet specialized compliance needs.

Scale: We’re Talking Big

With electronic information growing at a crazy pace and businesses spending billions on eDiscovery every year, records managers have enough to keep them up at night. The scale of their records/content management system shouldn’t be another worry.

A large part of the effort in this release has been spent adding features to make it easier to scale to massive archives. Features such as Remote Blob Storage, database query optimizations, internal timer job processing improvements, new database indexing strategies and other engineering initiatives enable SharePoint to make a great leap forward and all you to have:

Tens of millions of records in a single Records Center
Hundreds of millions of records in a distributed archive: allow many Record Centers to bind together to act as one logical repository.

How can Deltascheme Help You..?

Consultancy to define your business requirements
Professional Services to design, install and configure your system
Data migration tools to re‐classify & import your legacy content
Solutions to enable paper content to be scanned into the system
Services to deliver standard forms and workflow processes
Expertise to integrate SharePoint with your existing applications (e.g. Kofax)

To discuss further, contact us here

Records Management Conference 2010

Clive Walker — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:10:50 +0000

Why not come and talk to us about records management with SharePoint 2007 and what the major improvements are for SharePoint 2010. We will also present on the morning of the 22 March on the improvements in SharePoint 2010 for records management; for a clue see http://www.deltascheme.com/2010/01/28/ecm-sharepoint-improvements/

About Deltascheme

Consultancy to define your business requirements
Professional Services to design, install and configure your system
Data migration tools to re‐classify & import your legacy content
Solutions to enable paper content to be scanned into the system
Services to deliver standard forms and workflow processes
Expertise to integrate SharePoint with your existing applications

Call us to find out more 01628 401 800…..

RapidRedact Desktop 2.2 Released

Clive Walker — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:37:51 +0000

RapidRedact Reports

The all-new Reporting feature allows organizations to generate reports for information redacted from documents and for users to quickly access details about documents that they have redacted themselves.

The reports contain detailed information about what has been redacted, including the type of information, how many instances of each target was found, what exemption codes were used, and on what pages the redactions occurred.

The Reporting feature benefits both organizations and users alike, by allowing them to quickly review details of redacted documents after output. The reports are saved along with the related Audit document or at a user-defined location and can be accessed for future reference purposes.

Want more information or a trial..?

Look here for more information and a 30 second demo, otherwise contact us directly on +44 (0) 1628 401 800 for a quote or to purchase.

About Deltascheme

Deltascheme is a leading provider of ECM and BPM solutions using Microsoft technologies.

We expertise delivering a broad range of integrated solutions such as EDRM, Case Management, Extranets, Intranets, CRM, Business Intelligence and data migration projects. Based in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, Deltascheme has over 23 years experience of software engineering.

Operating System Requirements of SharePoint 2010

Clive Walker — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:19:46 +0000

From the Microsoft SharePoint Team …

SharePoint 2010 will support only 64-bit (x64) versions of Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Server 2008 R2. SharePoint will not install at all on 32 bit Windows, or any earlier version of Windows such as Windows Server 2000 or Windows Server 2003.

SharePoint is not supported on ‘Server Core’ installations of Windows Server 2008 and R2. The Server Core installations of Windows server do not contain some of the components required for SharePoint to be configured or run.

To make developing for SharePoint 2010 easier, it is possible to install SharePoint on 64-bit versions of Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7. Note that running production environments on these OSes are not supported and it will not be possible to upgrade deployments running on client versions of Windows to future versions of SharePoint. Instructions on installing SharePoint 2010 on client versions of Windows are a bit more involved and we recommend reading the instructions at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx.

How can Deltascheme Help You..?

Consultancy to define your business requirements
Professional Services to design, install and configure your system
Data migration tools to re‐classify & import your legacy content
Solutions to enable paper content to be scanned into the system
Services to deliver standard forms and workflow processes
Expertise to integrate SharePoint with your existing applications (e.g. Kofax)

To discuss further, contact us here

Top 10 ECM Improvements in SharePoint 2010

Clive Walker — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:11:25 +0000

Top 10 Improvements

Greater scalability & distributed architecture.
Richer authoring and content creation tools.
Improved User Interface and Site Definitions.
Enterprise-wide Content Types.
Managed Metadata Service & Metadata Navigation Settings.
Office Client Integration and Office Web Apps.
Document Sets & Content Organizer.
In-place Records Management.
Distributed Record Centres.
Enterprise Search (Fast Search for SharePoint – Enterprise CAL).

How can Deltascheme help you?

Consultancy to define your business requirements
Professional Services to design, install and configure your system
Data migration tools to re‐classify & import your legacy content
Solutions to enable paper content to be scanned into the system
Services to deliver standard forms and workflow processes
Expertise to integrate SharePoint with your existing applications