Document and records management in MOSS

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About SharePoint’s document and records management features

Many clients expect that SharePoint’s document and records management features will play a significant role in enterprise content management solutions. As many of these features are new to this version of SharePoint, there is a lot of confusion about when SharePoint is a good fit, and when it falls short.

There are few products on the market that combine collaborative and team-based document authoring with fully compliant records archival. One of SharePoint’s biggest strengths is the “team site” that can be built to store and share documents and other information around particular business processes (such as projects) or company subjects (such as products, customers, or geographies). With MOSS 2007, documents within these team sites can easily be escalated to a “record status” within an organization and flow to an area in SharePoint that can be secured, audited, indexed, and managed as typical records management (RM) systems allow.

As of June 2007, SharePoint is DoD 5015.2 certified. The Department of Defence (DoD) is a widely accepted standard in North America for ensuring a product contains a sufficient level of features to support a compliant RM solution.

While fully compliant RM solutions can be built on MOSS 2007, there are some cases where supplementary systems, third-party products, or custom code may be required:

  • scanning and imaging solutions
  • large volume image management
  • composite document archival
  • multi-faceted classification searches
  • desktop client integration with non-Office clients (such as CAD programs)
  • offline synchronization

(Presently, Microsoft has not released the records management pack, which may include features that eliminate the need for third-party products. There is no specific date targeted for this pack release.)

How we help you

We help you evaluate, plan, and build your enterprise content management solution. Our services for records management span from strategy and implementation to governance. Components of our support can include the following:

  • developing a strategy for your records management initiative
  • choosing and evaluating a records management platform
  • creating an implementation roadmap centred on your corporate goals and objectives
  • planning taxonomies, information structures, and meta data structures for your content
  • analyzing business process information flow and creating to-be models of communication
  • customizing workflow and records routing
  • building and configuring your MOSS-based platform
  • creating or customizing the platform to meet your specific business requirements
  • creating a governance structure and plan for the long-term sustainment of your solution

SharePoint document and records management resources

While there are still few online resources available for using MOSS as a records management solution, here are some of our favourites: