This is an excellent question that addresses a fundamental understanding of SharePoint records mangement and is vital to a successful solution implementation, so I thought it might be a good idea to post my response here. 

Many retention and disposition requirements (indeed, most retention and disposition requirements at some organizations) are determined by an event rather than the type of record being managed, so a record’s Content Type is usually not enough information to accurately apply the correct Information Management Policy to it. 

This is probably best explained by an example.  Suppose you manage mortgages at a large financial institution.  With each new mortgage a new corresponding folder is created in your records repository.  Over the life of the mortgage, hundreds of records with dozens of different record types – Mortgage Agreements, Property Assessments, etc., etc. – will be added to the folder.  And most (or more likely, all) of these records will have their own Content Type.  Internal corporate policy and outside regulations require that these records are maintained for 10 years after the mortgage is paid off, at which point all the records in the folder, as well as the folder itself, are destroyed. 

From this example – known as case based records retention – it is easy to see why a record’s Content Type alone  wouldn’t provide adequate information for applying the appropriate retention and disposition schedule.  If you were to simply apply a 10-year expiration to, say, all Mortgage Agreement Content Types, SharePoint wouldn’t have any way of knowing when the record’s mortgage was paid off, so it wouldn’t ever trigger the record’s 10 year expiration period.   

This example also explains why the addition of Content Organizer was so critical to successful records management in SharePoint 2010.  Using Content Organizer, we can configure SharePoint to route a record to a folder in the Records Center based on its Content Type (e.g. ‘Mortgage Agreement’) and one or more metadata values (e.g. ‘Mortgage #12345′).  Once the records are properly classified into the correct folder, an Event Date can be applied to all the records it contains upon payoff of the mortgage and the 10 year expiration period can begin in compliance with corporate and external requirements.

Easily the biggest source of confusion is the definition of email records management itself.  Frankly, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had someone tell me they already have an email records management solution and it works just fine, thank you very much for asking…  These folks usually describe their ‘email records management solution’ like this:  ‘We store all our emails for two years from date of creation or receipt.’ 

This may be a very valid policy – particularly from a e-discovery perspective – but it is not email records management.  This is email archiving. 

Email is a format.  It’s a method of delivering the information the email contains.  In the paper world this would be equivalent to a policy that states, ‘Store all correspondence that comes in white, rectangular envelopes for two years from the date they were received.’  These types of policies give no consideration to the value of the information the emails contain. 

True email records management means evaluating the content of the email (and, potentially, its attachments) and classifying it into a repository that renders it immutable and applies business rules that make it compliant with your organization’s information management requirements.  One of those business rules should apply the appropriate retention and disposition.

Here’s an example.  Suppose you are the Project Manager on a large solution deployment.  Your customer sends you an email indicating she has accepted the new project scope changes and has attached a copy of the revised Project Plan.  Your email archiving policy will maintain a copy of this email for two years, after which it will be destroyed.  Forever.  But, from a legal perspective, all project records (regardless of their media) must be maintained for 10 years after the project is completed and then destroyed.  So that email, like all the other content critical to the success of the project, must be declared a record and managed throughout the life of the project. 

So hopefully that clarifies email records management a little bit.  In my next post I will explain not only one way to manage your email records, but frankly, I think the only way it can be done successfully.

If you’d like to attend my presentation, here’s a link to the ARMA Metro MD registration page.

And if you are a reader of this blog, please be sure to introduce yourself.  Nothing would make me happier than an opportunity to hear from you in person.  Hope to see you there!

That said, I’ve reached a point where I don’t believe I can continue to speak in terms of records management as a separate notion from managing the lifecycle of all unstructured content.  As I’ve said in a number of interviews, I never fully bought into the idea that content can be divided into ‘records’ and ‘documents’.  This is a misleading concept that evolved almost by accident in the mid-90′s when document management applications (e.g. Documentum, OpenText, etc.) were developed separately from records management applications (e.g. TrueArc, Meridio, Tower TRIM, etc.), leading to the idea that is was perfectly acceptable to manage one but not the other. 

The fundamental flaw with this notion is that you can call one piece of content a ‘document’ and another piece of content a ‘record’, but none of that matters because in the eyes of the law it is all evidence.  Which, of course, means it is all discoverable and its unnecessary retention – or its premature disposition – can put an organization at tremendous risk.

So what does this mean to professional Records Managers?  It means our responsibilities have become much more far reaching than they have ever been before.  It means, quite simply, that we must take ownership of the entire lifecycle of our organization’s content.  We can no longer be content to sit back and let content come to us so we can manage it through its final end state.  Instead, we must be proactively involved in every phase of the information’s lifecycle.  From cradle to grave. 

This also means we should no longer speak in terms of ‘records management solutions’.  This term is simply no longer relevant.  We must now focus on information management solutions that address every phase of the information lifecycle.  And this must be done across the entire enterprise.  This is what I refer to as the Integrated Information Lifecycle Management (IILM) model and it includes all of the traditional records management functions, but also incorporates many features long considered outside standard records management responsibilities.  These include, but certainly aren’t limited to, the following:

• eDiscovery and information preservation orders
• Solution governance
• Retention and disposition of transitory content
• Email archiving policies
• Shared drive management and cleanup
• Enterprise taxonomy and metadata design
• Workflows
• Software obsolescence
• Hardware obsolescence
• Long term storage
• Physical records management
• Backup and recovery
• Continuity of Operations, vital records and disaster recovery
• Legacy solution integrations
• Document template creation
• Structured data lifecycle management
• Information Rights Management
• Privacy and security
• Social media best practices
• Web content management
• Many, many more…

So you’re probably thinking, ‘Sure, Don, that’s great and all, but isn’t this a SharePoint records and information management blog?’  To which I reply, ‘Yes.  Yes, it is.  Thank you for keeping me focused.’

I have a great deal of experienced with a number of the major enterprise content and records management solutions and I can honestly say that, with a few exceptions, they are terrific applications.  I also believe that most of them could be leveraged to implement the IILM model with varying levels of effort.  But I honestly believe that no other existing platform is in a better position to manage enterprise content from its creation, through its retention and to its final disposition than SharePoint.  And going forward into the New Year it will be my goal to demonstrate to you why I believe this is true.

Personally, I’m a little torn by the whole ‘cloud’ thing, but it reminds me a lot of the transition from mainframe computers to the client/server model we all went through 20 years or so ago.  (Yes, I’m that old.)

I can remember a lot of people I worked with who resisted the change for a long time.  And they often did so with fairly compelling arguments.  But eventually the obvious benefits of the client/server model overwhelmed even the most ardent opponents of change and, in the end, the new way of doing things was almost universally accepted. 

I don’t think operating in the cloud is a whole lot different.  There are plenty of good reasons not to do it.  But my sense is, over time, vendors will devise ways to mitigate those risks to the point that the anti-cloud argument will become more and more difficult to make.

Easily the most compelling argument I hear against a cloud-based solution from a Records Manager’s perspective is this: How do I manage my records repository pursuant to location-based compliance requirements when it’s not completely clear where my records repository even is?  Records Managers are very reluctant to give up control of their record repository.  This shouldn’t be surprising given it’s their neck that gets choked if regulations get violated or data sovereignty is beached.

So how can this risk be mitigated?  Enter Office 365 and the hybrid cloud model.  In a nutshell, a hybrid cloud model allows you to combine your current on-premises SharePoint records repository (and all the compliance and security that goes with it) with the cloud-based efficiency of Office 365. 

If your organization is contemplating a cloud computing strategy (and it should be) and you have concerns about your SharePoint records repository, I encourage you to learn more about hybrid cloud environments.   A great place to start is a terrific whitepaper on the subject by Paul Robinson of Microsoft, UK.  You can find it here.

Here are the results so far, hot off the presses.

One way that I think you can measure the coolness of an industry is to look at who is doing the entertainment at industry functions (I know, frivolous, but stick with me).

Let's be honest for a minute about the kinds of bands one would see at ECM user conferences in recent years. Gladys Knight and the Pip (yes, there is sadly only one Pip left). Earth, Wind, and Fire. Fortunately for everyone concerned, at least no one booked Bachman Turner Overdrive despite the potential attractiveness of a "Taking Care of Business with ECM" theme.

Well, judging by 2 recent user conferences I attended last month, the times they are a changin' (OK, I realize this is a dated reference).

I was lucky enough to go to Box's Boxworks conference and IBM's Information on Demand event. The bands? Third Eye Blind and train. Bands my kids like. Bands my kids have heard in concert. Clearly an inflection point. This ain't your Father's content management; content is cool again.

I can't think of two more different companies on the content spectrum than Box and IBM, and yet the coolness factor not only applied to the bands, but to the value proposition being articulated.

Box's focus on content management in the cloud is clearly striking a chord with those looking for file share replacements and document centric collaboration and simplicity of implementation. The 18,000 seat P&G implementation they announced represents something of a tipping point for me in terms of the viability and relevance of cloud-based content management.  So too did the investment by Salesforce.com in the company.  At the other end of the spectrum, IBM's extension of the Watson technology set into real applications and the broader case studies focused on the power of analytics and big data were, frankly, way cool. 

All of this is not to say that Box and IBM are better or worse than any other solutions, because that's not my job.

But I am excited about what these events say about the coolness factor of content technologies as an industry and what these two user conferences indicate about the future -- in wildly varying content spaces. I'm doubly excited that a centerpiece of BOTH of these events was the work that AIIM did with Geoffrey Moore on Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement (http://www.aiim.org/futurehistory).

Social. Mobile. Cloud. Big Data. They are all reenergizing and redefining content management.  Here are some of the themes we're teeing up for next year...

• Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PCs to Tablets
• Big Data: Extracting Value from Digital Landfills
• Solving the SharePoint Puzzle: Adding the Right Missing Pieces
• Faster, Simpler, Smarter: Collaborating and Processing in the Cloud
• Social in the Flow: Transforming Processes

So get rid of those bell bottomed jeans. Download some of your kid's tracks from iTunes (they probably charged them to your account anyway) and get ready for the future of content management.

----

Speaking of cool, I'm keynoting OpenText's Content World November 16 (My peeps save $300 w/ code CW2011KEY - http://bit.ly/unc4le) and also running an Executive Social Business Seminar with Oracle in NY on November 10.

Have you signed up for the new AIIM Conference March 2012 in San Francisco? For solution providers, almost all the premium slots are sold - get moving! For attendees, mark your calendars!

November 3-5, 2011 at the Westin Diplomat Resort and Spa. (Download brochure)

Here's an excerpt from Lynda's post...

Why isn't "search" the logical end-point in any content and information management activity. If we don't care about being able to find valued and valuable information, why bother with any of the myriad technologies employed to capture, organize, categorize, store, and analyze content. What on earth is the point of having our knowledge workers document the results of their business, science, engineering and marketing endeavors, if we never aspire to having it retrieved, leveraged or re-purposed by others?

However, in Information Week, an article in the September 5, 2011 issue entitled "HP Transformation: Autonomy is a Modest Start" gave me a jolt with this comment: Autonomy has very sophisticated search capabilities including federation--the ability to search across many repositories and sources--and video and image search. But with all that said, enterprise search isn't a hot, mission-critical business priority. [NOTE: in the print version the "call-out" box had slightly different phrasing but it jumped off the page, anyway.] This is pretty provocative and disappointing to read in the pages of this particular publication.

Read more in her original post.

Interestingly, Gartner notes that even though the global economy has been in a prolonged recession the last few years, spending on enterprise content and records management actually grew on a year after year basis.  Spending was up 5.1% in 2009 and increased again by 7.6% last year.  Moreover, they predict growth will continue at an impressive compound annual rate of 11.4% through 2015.  (Hey, maybe my kids will go to college after all!)

Gartner says its clients use ECM solutions to meet a number of productivity objectives, including regulatory compliance and e-discovery goals.  One of the keys to reaching these goals, they say, is an ‘integration with Microsoft Office Suite for management of new and collaboratively authored content’.  This is apparently true regardless of the ECM solution being used.

As for SharePoint as an ECM solution, Gartner says that over half the inquiries they receive about ECM solutions include a discussion of SharePoint.  Also, fully one-third of their client base is using SharePoint as the core of their records and content management strategy. 

Gartner cautions that many organizations see a continued need to add third-party tools to SharePoint 2010 to realize an acceptably robust enterprise ECM solution. This may be true, but I would argue that this is also the case for most of the other major ECM solutions and Microsoft’s extensive partner ecosystem allows customers to chose the SharePoint features they would like to extend without paying for additional functionality that may provide them no additional value.

Some of the strengths Gartner found in SharePoint 2010 include features and functionality that directly affect its records management capabilities.  These strengths include greater content management, taxonomy, metadata and search capabilities.

As usual, this report makes for pretty compelling reading for anyone in the content and records management business.    If you aren’t a Gartner client, you might want to go here to get a full copy of the report.