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..?

Deltascheme is uniquely placed in the UK, having extensive experience in both the implementation of full records management solutions and with the design, configuration and implementation of SharePoint.

By way of an example we are often asked the question; “how do you do records management in SharePoint?” As a result we offer our customers a standard three days consulting engagement which is designed to provide a review of your organisations’ high level requirements and to then talk and show how SharePoint can be configured to deliver an effective Electronic Document and Records Management solution.

Additionally we can assist with the implementation of other applications in SharePoint which are associated with records management such as subject matter access requests (FoI, DP, Environmental and Ministerial, etc.), case management, business process management and integrated scanning solutions (ensuring legal admissibility).  

To discuss further, contact us here

Related posts:

1. SharePoint 2010 & ECM
2. Document & Records Management with SharePoint 2010
3. SharePoint Migration Tools

1. Large Lists and Libraries – Microsoft have made architecture and user experience investments so you have much larger document libraries with metadata driven navigation to help users go quickly to the content that is most important to them. Libraries will scale to tens of millions and archives to hundreds of millions of documents. This is a key investment for high-end document and records management but also helps organizations with lots of smaller sites. Microsoft have enhanced the workflow capabilities and tools in SharePoint Designer.
2. Enterprise Metadata – Microsoft are addressing the feedback to support content types and taxonomies across not only across sites but also server farms. Theyhave made applying this metadata easy (and valuable to users) in both the SharePoint and Office client user experience. The top-down taxonomy and bottoms-up social tagging (sometimes called folksonomy) combine to help improve search, navigation and people connections.
3. Document Sets – Microsoft are introducing a way to manage a collection of documents as a single object for workflow, metadata, etc. within SharePoint and Office so experience more closely models your work product (e.g. a proposal that may contain a presentation, budget, contract, etc.).
4. Web Publishing including Digital Asset Management – Microsoft have made a number of key improvements to make it easier to publish rich sites on the intranet or internet. They used the new browser ribbon and editor experience to speed site customization, content authoring and publishing tasks. Microsoft added digital asset management features like thumbnails, metadata and ratings for images as well as video streaming from SharePoint. Finally, they have improved content deployment robustness from authoring to production for larger scale sites.
5. Governance and Records Management – Compliance is an increasingly important requirement for organizations. Microsoft have enhanced the Records Managements features in 2010 building on the scalable storage and enterprise metadata support described above. They have improved the sophistication and flexibility of the governance tools. Just a few new features include location-based file plans, multi-stage dispositions, in-place records and e-discovery.

If you are considering implementing a Document and Records Management or Case Management System, reserve your place at our seminar on the 21 January 2010 at the Microsoft HQ in London or contact us directly to find out how we can help.

Deltascheme is a leading provider of business and technical consultancy for Electronic Content Management and Business Process Management solutions based on Microsoft Technologies

SharePoint 2010 & EDRMS

Related posts:

1. Records Management in SharePoint 2010
2. Whitepaper “ Business Value of SharePoint for ECM”
3. Top 10 ECM Improvements in SharePoint 2010