SharePoint Will be Your Repository for Governed Content

Transcription

1 WHITEPAPER SharePoint Will be Your Repository for Governed Content by Mike Alsup, Gimmal 1

2 About Gimmal Gimmal is the world s leading provider of solutions built on Microsoft SharePoint that extend and enhance its broad enterprise information management and governance capabilities and provide SAP content archiving and interoperability. With Gimmal s ground-breaking and award-winning solutions you can easily transform SharePoint into a platform that consistently governs and manages the content, documents and records in your organization and work with content online or offline from your Windows 8 PC, Tablet or Windows Phone. For more information, visit Copyright 2014 by Gimmal LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. 2

3 Table of Contents 1.1 Introduction Is SharePoint Winning and Forcing Consolidation of the ECM and RM Market? What Does SharePoint Need for Content Governance? Why Content Governance from Inside SharePoint is the Answer Summary

4 Introduction This whitepaper describes why SharePoint, whether on-premise or in Office 365, will remain your primary Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repository for SharePoint content, regardless of how often analysts, consultants or entrenched competitive vendors tell you otherwise. Rapid changes in the information management landscape have made this a topic that requires discussion as SharePoint and its add-on ecosystem are disrupting both the traditional ECM and federated content governance markets. The goal of this paper is to outline the requirements for enterprise content governance 1 of the full range of content stored in SharePoint and to describe best-practices for enterprise-scaled content governance based on a foundation in SharePoint. The whitepaper also argues that most organizations that have SharePoint already, whether on-premise or in Office 365, will choose to use it for content governance because of the difficulties of sustaining an integration with an external governance solution across the diversity, rates of change and scale of SharePoint sites and content in most large organizations. It is clear that there won t be just one winner for content governance solutions, because of the differences in organizational requirements, budgets, and the variety of solutions that currently exist. However, the largest market share will go to content governance tools based inside SharePoint, not externally. It is clear that there won t be just one winner for content governance solutions, because of the differences in organizational requirements, budgets, and the variety of solutions that currently exist. Numerous individuals and groups have suggested that SharePoint out of the box (OOB) has enough capabilities to achieve enterprise content governance. This perspective minimizes the scope of the enterprise content governance problems to be solved across thousands of SharePoint sites, with terabytes of content and tens of thousands of users who are using SharePoint both on-premises and, increasingly, in the Office 365 (SharePoint Online) environment. What we have seen is that the enterprise challenge of content governance in SharePoint is usually addressed through an analysis of customization vs. add-on product functionality (build vs. buy) based on the variety of SharePoint challenges in familiar content governance use case scenarios. 2 Is SharePoint Winning and Forcing Consolidation of the ECM and RM Market? The arguments to standardize on SharePoint are straightforward: cost, ubiquity, integration with Microsoft Office, etc. The arguments not to standardize on SharePoint and continue with multiple best of breed content repositories are also straightforward: SharePoint is too complex for the end-user, it is too expensive (if even achievable) to consolidate, and current content repositories work adequately, etc. The bifurcation of SharePoint into Office 365 and on-premises versions complicates this analysis in those organizations that have ongoing SharePoint investments and implementations by adding new decisions to be made about how best to deploy SharePoint. Here is some recent data on the market penetration of SharePoint: 4

5 135MM+ SharePoint Licensed Users 65,000+ Companies Using SharePoint in business annually for Microsoft SharePoint is a Popular Platform SharePoint accounts for SharePoint is clearly energizing ECM and Records Management (RM) in many organizations, but the complexities involved in implementing an enterprise SharePoint-based solution for content governance has overwhelmed many large Microsoft customers. This is why the SharePoint add-on ecosystem has become so important to Microsoft. SharePoint is an enormously powerful and complex platform that does 80% of many tasks very well. It is widely adopted, but applying enterprise-class content governance policies and rules to SharePoint requires significant upfront The SharePoint add-on ecosystem is an amalgamation of solutions and extensions that have been created by many organizations to enhance SharePoint s already capable information management functionality and to better enable the enterprise deployment of SharePoint for a variety of purposes. SharePoint Developers of 50% ECM inquiries planning and investment. The SharePoint add-on ecosystem is an amalgamation of solutions and extensions that have been created by many organizations to enhance SharePoint s already capable information management functionality and to better enable the enterprise deployment of SharePoint for a variety of purposes. To the extent that these solutions address governance challenges through configuration rather than customization and reduce the amount of work needed to implement content governance solutions, they will be widely adopted. What Does SharePoint Need for Content Governance? A typical large organization using SharePoint has hundreds if not thousands of sites with many more being added every week. To avoid the biggest outstanding issue with SharePoint - site sprawl - governance must be included in these sites when they are initially provisioned (created), because the after-the-fact integration of governance into sites is much more difficult. The use of site provisioning tools ensures that governance is consistently incorporated and manageable across all sites from the moment they are created. Unified content governance in SharePoint sites requires a variety of components and approaches to be used. One such component is SharePoint content types (also known as document types) which are essential and are the secret sauce of SharePoint from a governance perspective. SharePoint allows the rules for content governance to be defined by content type, so that when a piece of content is assigned a content type, it inherits the metadata and governance rules for that type of content. Governing content inside SharePoint from solutions that are outside of SharePoint is much more difficult because it is so hard to integrate and synchronize with SharePoint content types at a granular enough level to keep up with the rates of change from outside. There is also a requirement for event integration if governance is being performed from 5

6 outside of SharePoint so that the external system knows when an event inside SharePoint has occurred and a governance action (for example, move, copy, stub, hold, delete, etc.) needs to take place. On-premise, Office 365, and Hybrid Cloud are three different models for the enterprise deployment of SharePoint. A question for many organizations is how to govern a mixed SharePoint environment that includes all three models based on a single enterprise information lifecycle? This is not a scenario that Microsoft has designed either SharePoint or Office 365 to support, as illustrated by the fact that you cannot easily send a document from an Office 365 site to an on-premises SharePoint Record Center or vice versa. What is needed are solutions that enable consistent content governance across multiple SharePoint environments and in Hybrid SharePoint scenarios, but this capability is not yet natively provided by Microsoft. According to a recent AIIM study 4, 43% of organizations have no plans to store content in SharePoint in the Cloud. If an organization is considering a migration to SharePoint Online (aka SharePoint 2013 inside Office 365), it could require a significant effort to move and convert existing SharePoint sites to the Office 365 model. Why is this important? Buyers expect support for their existing on-premises SharePoint solutions and the included content to be maintained with governance included for foreseeable future, but they also want a straightforward path to the Cloud for their eventual move. Logically, the first step in the ascent to the Cloud would be Hybrid SharePoint. The long term economics of Cloud storage for content are not clear. Office 365 is a compelling way to collaborate in SharePoint, but content governance, particularly formal records management, involves the long term storage of inactive documents, and storing massive volumes of inactive content in the Cloud might not be cost effective. Current metrics suggest that over a three year period it would be as costly to store content in the Cloud as it would be in Tier 1 storage. According to recent Gartner information, the average cost (over three years) of Tier one storage is $5/GB, and the average cost of Cloud Storage over that same period, is $4.50/GB. 5 Fear of the unknown is a key factor mitigating their organization s adoption of Office 365. Many corporate lawyers that we have talked to believe that Office 365 is a compelling solution if our records are stored in our data centers. Although a logical first step, the Hybrid Cloud still has its challenges. A Hybrid cloud solution that includes governance requires either simplifying assumptions or simplifying tools to enable the consistent enforcement of information policy across multiple environments. This is because the policy federation and enforcement mechanisms need to be carefully planned, designed and implemented. Legacy or existing SharePoint sites must also be included in any content governance scenario. An organization s collection of sites may include hundreds or thousands sites spread across multiple versions of SharePoint that have been implemented using a variety of software development approaches. There are several options to achieve enterprise content governance related to legacy SharePoint sites. For example, an organization can: Archive the site The Cost of External Public Cloud Storage $1.80 per GB $7.20 per GB Close the site (make it Read Only and no longer able to accept new or changed content) 6

7 Understand the value of the content and move it to a new, conforming site that has governance policies already in place. Understand the value of the content and automatically apply an information policy to content in legacy sites based on rules and content types. Then, enforce the rules as the content in the site ages. This could include moving the content to a repository of record as indicated in the lifecycle. SharePoint Items and Lists must be included in any content governance scenario. Items include events, links, tasks, workflow history, posts and comments, folders and issues. Typical content governance products address only 15-20% of the content in SharePoint, mainly the documents. Collaboration is typically ~60% List content, and there is no industry consensus on requirements and best practices for Item and List content governance. Most external content governance solutions ignore this area altogether. From a user perspective: Every user (from novice to expert) have unique uses for Lists Lists frequently replace Excel Spreadsheets and Access databases Once created, Lists contain valuable knowledge and information assets that often need to be retained From an IT Perspective: Items and List content is typically % structured data Many SharePoint sites persist because Items and Lists with valuable information need to be retained and available to users perpetually Management of List items is site-by-site, and is usually performed manually Items and Lists can be managed in a SharePoint Record Center, however they are not typically included in Record Centers because the Governance and Access rules are applied differently than for documents in SharePoint sites. SharePoint content governance requires a strategy for site governance. This includes corporate policies for content management and governance needs where the Legal, IT, and Business Unit representatives have agreed on the components that need to be included in sites and these components are automatically included using site provisioning tools. Users perceive this process as rapid and consistent, but it s primarily benefit is better content governance. The establishment of corporate policies and best practices for information policies, an information lifecycle, navigation, security, records management rules, and metadata management are all required to ensure that SharePoint content can be effectively governed. As a result of these factors, SharePoint content governance is a very challenging problem even without the consideration of other content repositories that exist within an organization s information infrastructure. This breadth of requirements for the governance of content inside SharePoint is difficult to achieve and support from either inside or outside of SharePoint. Why Content Governance from Inside SharePoint is the Answer There are several options for SharePoint content governance. One of these options is to federate information policy into SharePoint content metadata from an external content governance provider, such as IBM, Open Text, HP Autonomy, or RSD. Typically, when external SharePoint governance alternatives are demonstrated, a vendor shows how a document can be manually moved to a separate and external repository of record, with a link or stub left behind in SharePoint. This enables content in SharePoint to be governed by an external system while retaining SharePoint as the end-user access point to content. In some cases, the governance is performed on objects In Place in SharePoint, but complex synchronization and enforcement are still required 6. This may be practical for a single document but it is a nightmare for millions of documents unless the process is highly automated. It is not difficult to integrate external governance into a single SharePoint 7

8 site. It is much more difficult to accurately provision and manage thousands of SharePoint sites in an environment where the content moves between sites and out of SharePoint at certain points in its lifecycle. The question is, how can we ensure that content under governance maintains the correct state in its lifecycle after being moved? The question is, how can we ensure that content under governance maintains the correct state in its lifecycle after being moved? It has always been difficult to federate content governance rules between multiple ECM and RM solutions, due to the fact that these systems were never built to work together. Connector vendors tried to facilitate the federation of information policy across ECM environments, but had limited success for the reasons outlined in this whitepaper, and these same reasons still apply today and are true for SharePoint. In the longer term, both the rules and rapid evolution of the SharePoint App model, and the proprietary languages, development tools, and lack of scale of the traditional ECM vendors have hurt their chances to win the competition to federate content governance rules into SharePoint. The platform investments are so large and continuous. The modern pure federated information policy vendors have a better competitive position than the traditional ECM vendors, but like ECM vendors, they require external content and data repositories to perform the governance. Their lack of a proven ECM repository and the difficulty of governing SharePoint externally hurts their competitive position in this market. Another set of options are contained in SharePoint and its add-on alternatives. There are several vendors with a variety of approaches to the governance of content inside SharePoint. On the one hand, there are vendors whose governance strategies emphasize retention management as opposed to records management. These vendors enable simple retention decisions to be made based on the date a document was created or last modified. Holds can be placed on these documents and these holds suspend destruction decisions. The vendors in this category include Microsoft itself, with its new Document Deletion Policy capabilities. Other vendors who follow this approach include AvePoint, Metalogix, Proofpoint, and others. This approach works well with temporary and work-in-progress content, but typically it doesn t support the full records management requirements of large organizations, especially when deletion decisions are related to case management or external events that were not complete when the record was declared. Another category of SharePoint add-on vendors focus on extending the records management capabilities of SharePoint to address traditional records management requirements. These vendors include Collabware, File Trail, Gimmal, KnowledgeLake and RecordPoint. These vendors are differentiated by their target clients, use cases, connectors and other features and components. There is a vigorous competition between them, and their capabilities are all improving rapidly. A key factor to consider is that the governance of content from inside SharePoint via a fully integrated content governance add-on has several advantages and disadvantages: Advantages of inside SharePoint Records Management: Full integration with SharePoint infrastructure makes Microsoft components, such as content types, managed metadata, events, and SharePoint Search available to SharePoint sites that are provisioned to include governance. Other services, such site provisioning, an enterprise information lifecycle, and Active Directory, do not need to be integrated with external infrastructure. 8

9 Integrations with other Microsoft products, such as OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Exchange, Share Drives, Office 365, Yammer, SQL Server, Azure and others are already supported by Microsoft. Data and documents are stored in a single environment and less coordination, synchronization and integration are required. It is more practical to make content governance transparent to users from inside SharePoint, because the governance is contained within a single vendor s infrastructure. Users can stay inside SharePoint and the Office products for the vast majority of their content interactions. Since SharePoint is already owned, these solutions are usually much less expensive because organizations are leveraging an existing investment. Disadvantages of inside SharePoint Records Management: Content governance, especially records management, is less mature in the SharePoint add-on ecosystem than in the established, traditional ECM providers, such as Open Text, IBM (FileNet) and EMC (Documentum). The SharePoint add-on vendors are often smaller and might not have established an international presence. Each of the SharePoint Add-on vendors has records management functionality gaps in their products that need to be filled, including full physical records management, support for Federated or In-Place records management, certifications by the DoD , MoReq 2010, and VERS standards, among others. All of these vendors have aggressive product roadmaps, but developing software products and attaining certifications takes time and money. Their partner networks have not yet matured to the degree that the partners and professional services teams of traditional ECM providers. Additionally, most SharePoint Records Management add-on providers have very small professional services teams if they offer professional services at all. So, there are risks in adopting inside SharePoint content governance solutions. But, the evolution of SharePoint supports the rapid consolidation of SharePoint content governance into products that are tightly integrated with the Microsoft stack because of the difficulty of keeping up with changes to SharePoint components from an external platform. Each of the SharePoint content governance options have niches where they excel. They are growing their capabilities rapidly and many organizations are adopting them. Summary Therefore, in a large fraction of organizations, especially ones that are using SharePoint today, SharePoint will win the competition to be the content management and governance standard. It is the path of least resistance and the alternatives are too hard to implement effectively. In the broader context of enterprise content governance, most organizations want to build an environment where content governance just works across all of their existing disparate and disconnected content repositories. In these organizations, there is a desire to connect all of the disparate content repositories under a centrally managed set of unified information policies. They recognize that they have a mix of content repositories, some new and supported, some old and not supported, with a variety of levels of content governance available. In this whitepaper, we focused on the governance of content inside SharePoint, either using a SharePoint add-on or an external content governance provider. The next whitepaper in this series will focus on extending SharePoint Information Policies so that they can be applied across the full range of an organization s content repositories. 9

10 Endnotes 1 In this document, content governance refers to the need to consistently enforce information policy, including records management, on documents or other content in multiple repositories. ECM refers to the need to access, manage and delete documents or other content throughout its lifecycle. A content repository is an ECM repository, but it reflects the wide diversity of management and governance capabilities available in the various repositories. 2 Market Overview: Information Governance For The Microsoft SharePoint Ecosystem, Q by Cheryl McKinnon, February 13, Jeff Teper presentation to 2012 SharePoint Conference 4 AIIM Research, SharePoint 2013: Clouding the Issues, September Gartner, New Options For Low-Cost Storage Systems July, 2013) 6 One large Gimmal client spent over $5MM to implement external records management over SharePoint content. 10