Solving the SharePoint Puzzle Where it Fits in Content Management Strategy

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1 hottopic ARMA International s Solving the SharePoint Puzzle Where it Fits in Content Management Strategy

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3 SharePoint for Records Management? Big and Getting Bigger Brian W. Hill, Forrester Research, Inc. It s no secret that organizations are deploying Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 at a rapid rate. During the October 2009 sold-out SharePoint Conference, Microsoft announced that SharePoint Server is one of the fastest-growing products in Microsoft s history, with more than $1.3 billion in revenue, representing more than a 20% growth over the past year. What may come as a surprise to some is that organizations are now using SharePoint extensively for records management. Given the importance of records management to broader enterprise content management (ECM) and legal risk mitigation strategies, we asked several vendorspecific questions in the Forrester Research and ARMA International Records Management Online Survey, which was completed in the third quarter of Respondents were asked, What software product(s) does your organization use for records management? and 17% of them reported using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for records management, nearly double the rate of the next closest offering. Some people might presume that SharePoint records management users work for smaller firms. Yet surprisingly, 42% of respondents using SharePoint records management are employed by organizations with more than 5,000 employees. While Microsoft has achieved remarkable market adoption in a relatively short time, respondents report lower satisfaction levels with SharePoint then they do with other records management solutions. While the satisfaction level for the overall records management market isn t high, only 36% of SharePoint records management users report that they are either somewhat or very satisfied (see Figure 1). As records management professionals know, there is no technology magic bullet. Yet key functional gaps in SharePoint 2007 likely impact satisfaction levels. In particular, MOSS 2007: Lacks physical records management and federated records management support. More than 80% of records management decision-makers use technology for physical records management. Offers no current DoD STD V3 certification. Forty-two percent of records management stakeholders say this requirement is important to records management purchases. Presents challenges in declaring records, managing file plans, and placing legal holds. A number of enterprises report challenges with SharePoint in the process of declaring and managing records, file plan capability constraints, and legal hold limitations. The joint survey shows that those organizations using SharePoint records management have a lower level of e-discovery confidence and are less confident in long-term retrieval capabilities than their peers. Insufficient attention to people and processes during deployments, not just software, stand out for many as a major factor impacting solution satisfaction. That said, Microsoft plans to incorporate significant functional enhancements to SharePoint Server 2010, including key advances in records management. Among other improvements, Microsoft expects to bolster capabilities for records declaration, litigation hold, and organizing 2010 ARMA International, H T 1

4 Courtesy of Forrester Research Inc. Figure 1: User Satisfaction with RM Solutions content within hierarchical file plans. Most significantly, SharePoint 2010 will offer multiple ways to manage records, including using a separate records center (records archive); using the same collaboration site where documents are created (in-place records); or using a hybrid approach. In prior versions, organizations could manage records by creating a records center site to serve as an archive, and then copy documents to the archive when they became records. In November 2009, Microsoft published pre-release documentation entitled Using a Records Archive Versus Managing Records in Place in SharePoint Server 2010 (see the entire guidance on Microsoft TechNet at library/ee424394(office.14).aspx). While subject to change, Microsoft provides the following documentation for these two primary records management approaches in SharePoint 2010: In-place records: This approach works best in well-established sites (e.g., knowledge management repositories) in which people actively use records that sit alongside nonrecords. This requires tight coordination between records managers, IT, and content stewards. Records archive: This approach uses a centralized vault to ingest less-managed content with a traditional, easier-to-implement hierarchal file plan. It provides one centralized view and location for all records across an enterprise. Among organizations expecting to ramp up records management products in 2010, 19% plan to leverage SharePoint for records management. Microsoft s anticipated new flexibility in managing records and other advances planned for SharePoint 2010 will likely increase this projected adoption rate. Yet significant gaps remain for more advanced user needs. Expect partners to fill in the holes where SharePoint doesn t go. During the first couple of years after Microsoft released MOSS 2007, traditional records and content management vendors sought to position MOSS 2007 as lightweight ECM offering suitable mainly for departmental or basic teamlevel collaboration scenarios. While MOSS 2007 does have shortcomings in comparison to mature ECM offerings, SharePoint s proven functionality and very strong adoption rates have led many of these same vendors to shift from competing with to complementing SharePoint functionality. Partners Offer SharePoint Certifications Certification clearly matters to records managers. Microsoft s DoD STD certification for Share- Point expired in May Recognizing a market opportunity, a handful of Microsoft partners have pursued certification for their respective records management offerings deployed in conjunction with Share- Point. As of this writing, the vendors listed in Figure 2 held DoD STD V3 certification for their records management offerings paired with SharePoint. Independent Vendors Offer FRM MOSS 2007 does not include capabilities for federated records management (FRM), the ability to apply records management controls in external repositories. Microsoft does not plan to introduce FRM functionality in SharePoint Several independent software vendors offer FRM that provides the ability to manage content within SharePoint repositories. While current overall FRM adoption is limited, 18% of records management stakeholders expect to ramp up these solutions in Organizations need for consistent administrative frameworks and retention policy management across multiple applications and repositories will drive significant FRM growth in As records management decision-makers become more familiar with FRM, they will evaluate a number of factors in determining whether to consolidate or to use an FRM approach. These include considerations regarding the security and compliance capabilities of existing applications, as well as associated deployment practices, repository size, and other elements. ECM Vendors Boost SharePoint Integrations Organizations typically have information assets dispersed through a range of different applications and repositories, including SharePoint. SharePoint s success has led many traditional ECM vendors to develop broader integrations beyond a pure records management focus. In addition to pursuing legal risk mitigation goals, these vendors emphasize their abilities to repurpose and reuse other business-critical data from Share- Point and a range of other systems to capture process efficiencies. A commonly marketed scenario is for an organization to use SharePoint on the front end (typically delivering a more familiar user interface) and the traditional ECM system on the back H T A R M A International,

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6 Courtesy of Forrester Research Inc. Figure 2: Complementary Products with DoD STD Certification end (delivering a solution with stronger compliance and archiving capabilities). As one of the creators of the content management interoperability services (CMIS) draft specification, Microsoft recently confirmed that it plans to support the standard for SharePoint. Given the broad vendor support behind CMIS and that many enterprises struggle with integration across multiple content management/ records management solutions, this initiative holds significant mediumand long-term potential for buyers. Some enterprises report however, that for records management requirements, they anticipate needing a higher degree of control than is expected to be available in the first release of CMIS. As CMIS solutions come on the market and mature, they should ultimately become a highly effective method enabling information sharing across content management repositories from different vendors. Archiving Vendors Capitalize on SharePoint Growth For complementary SharePoint archiving functionality, Microsoft partners with a number of vendors, including AvePoint, BlueThread Technologies, CommVault, EMC, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, Metalogix Software, Mimosa Systems, NetApp, Symantec, and others. While some of these vendors don t provide full records management capabilities, many offer broader compliance and retention management capabilities for SharePoint. Several also support capabilities for archiving additional content types and applications like and file shares. SharePoint Server 2010 will become available in the first half of this year, and records managers should look at this product in conjunction with partner support for records management needs. With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft plans significant records management enhancements that will bolster an already-strong adoption rate and meet the needs of many especially when complemented by partner solutions and accompanied by effective stakeholder alignment and governance. To get ready for this new deployment, organizations should: Focus on legal risk mitigation as part of your SharePoint strategy. In addition to regulatory requirements, with the revised U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure it s critical to incorporate a broad range of electronically stored information into your records management approach to stay out of legal hot water. E-discovery and regulatory requirements are not just about . Organizations that have SharePoint will need to apply appropriate governance to mitigate legal risk. Consider what Microsoft will deliver in SharePoint 2010 for records management. Nearly one of five records management stakeholders plans to use SharePoint for records management in This expected adoption outpaces traditional competitors, yet records managers currently using MOSS 2007 report satisfaction issues. People and process issues account for some of this, but the offering itself has some records management limitations. In preparing for SharePoint 2010, Microsoft devoted considerable effort to making records management improvements, including those related to records declaration, litigation hold, and organizing content within hierarchical file plans. Additional flexibility with in-place records and records archive in SharePoint 2010 looks promising, but as part of their planning process, organizations will need to consider trade-offs with these two alternatives. Determine which partners will help meet SharePoint legal risk mitigation objectives. With appropriate governance, Microsoft SharePoint can help organizations mitigate legal risk. Share- Point, however, has some records management shortcomings and lacks functionality for certain stages of the e-discovery process. Microsoft does not position itself as an end-to-end e-discovery provider. As organizations continue to expand already significant SharePoint investments, the importance of partner integrations will increase, especially for complementary records management functionality (e.g., physical records management), e-discovery capabilities (e.g., review), broader retention man-agement ability (e.g., across a wide array of content types and applications), and archiving (e.g., more effective use of storage and infrastructure). Brian W. Hill is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, serving information and knowledge management professionals. His expertise is on e-discovery, marchiving strategies, records and retention management initiatives, and enterprise content management endeavors. Hill can be contacted at bhill@forrester.com. To access Forrester research, including the survey mentioned in this article in conjunction with ARMA International, visit H T A R M A International,

7 Governance for Successfully Implementing SharePoint Marcia Douglas New and improved! Longer lasting! Tastes great, less filling okay, maybe the hype about Microsoft Share- Point Server (MSS) 2010 is a bit overdone. But it is inevitable. With the beta release of MSS 2010 and anticipation of the final General Software Availability release only months away, many individuals in the enterprise content management (ECM) community are wondering what this will mean for their organizations. Although it is vital to understand what technical ECM and records management (RM) capabil- ities are offered with MSS 2010, it is not the technology itself that makes a successful RM program. An effective enterprise RM program is driven by successfully enabling records capabilities seamlessly within a broader content management program supported by sound governance. Some Inadequacies Addressed Many in the RM community were largely disappointed with the ability of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 to provide a robust, enterprise-worthy RM solution. It appears at least from the beta release of MSS 2010 and its marketing materials that several key inadequacies have been rectified. Several new capabilities will interest records managers and should be mentioned as they do impact decisions organizations may make as to the enterprise readiness of MSS 2010 (and, perhaps, on whether to abandon or replace any existent RM applications). Most significantly for records managers, MSS 2010 provides two possible methods for managing records. The records center has been retained, yet content can also be managed in place meaning within the site collection itself, rather than being copied to the records center. So, 2010 ARMA International, H T 5

8 records declaration can be enabled more flexibly. In addition, MSS 2010 provides folder inheritance functionality. This facilitates associating policy at various nodes in the file plan and enabling any content filed to child folders to inherit the characteristics of the parent including metadata and retention policy. Managed metadata (managed terms), tagging (managed keywords), and faceted-type navigation (term sets) allow users to participate in content identification and administrators to layer controls on the level of participation. Type-ahead functionality may encourage users to leverage standardized terms and keywords. MSS 2010 s new content organizer provides the capability to autofile information based on the content type and metadata. Since content types and metadata can be defined and shared across all site collections, there is greater opportunity to achieve consistency in identifying content and applying retention policy. Notice the wording of the last sentence there is greater opportunity. Whether an organization chooses to leverage this opportunity remains a governance issue, rather than a technical one. MSS 2010 s improved technical capabilities will not, in and of themselves, ensure excellence in RM or content management. As many have discovered with MOSS 2007, having a defined strategy and adequate governance for leveraging ANY technology is crucial. For many organizations, MOSS 2007 was introduced without sufficient forethought about its governance. (See sidebar for questions organizations should resolve before deploying SharePoint.) The Governance Dilemma The problems with many MOSS 2007 deployments often stem back to basic strategy and governance inadequacies. Typically, robust business Governance Issues to Be Resolved Before Deploying SharePoint To be successful with a SharePoint deployment, organizations must establish governance for it by answering the following questions: Who will deploy a new site? Who will administer sites? Who owns the content retained on these sites? Who manages defining content types and list values? What sites and content will be open to search? How will access to sites be controlled? What will happen to the site when an employee s role changes or the employee is terminated? How will sites be decommissioned and when? When will content be declared as a record and moved to the records center? How will numerous sites and records centers be searched to locate relevant information for business decision making and/or regulatory and litigation inquiries? What business problems is the organization trying to solve by introducing SharePoint? And, why are these problems not being solved through the other ECM products already in use? MOSS 2007 support and administration has been a shared one. Organizations know how successful sharing can be kind of like sharing house cleaning someone will be stuck with the litter box. From the users perspective, one of the key benefits of MOSS 2007 was ownership or control. Independence and flexibility were embraced by the business (finally, freedom from the dogged software development lifecycle processes demanded by the IT department). But this resulted in site proliferation, site abandonment, inconsistencies in content identification, and unsatisfying search results. As MOSS 2007 use grew within the business, users discovered they were unable to navigate and search across collections or enforce consistency in access rights, retention poliapplications deployment are underpinned by having well-defined vision, leadership support and executive sponsorship, detailed requirements, good IT controls, and sound architectural decision making around performance and scalability. With MOSS 2007, these tenets have not always been in place. The initial inexpensive price tag for MOSS 2007 meant that the product was released into the enterprise with little planning about how it fit into the overall information management strategy and architecture. Often requirements for setting up new sites were not well-articulated. The volume of content and size of individual content objects sometimes resulted in slower performance pitting users and IT in a blame game about reliability and scalability. Also, for many organizations, responsibility for H T A R M A International,

9 ing content with the processes and tools the organization has provided for creating, sharing, searching, and retrieving that content. If content management is to be integral to an end user s daily activities, then creating, sharing, and searching for content must be easier and more intuitive. And the processes for preserving and protecting that content in a way that satisfies RM needs must be transparent and facilitated by minimal efforts required of users to create and share content. In short tastes great, less filling. Users want to create content using standard office applications and simply save them. The system should seamlessly store the content to a controlled repository. Users don t like document profile screens popping up and demanding completion of numerous indexing fields. So, they should be offered the option to tag content with keywords they find useful, and they should be able to tag the content anytime, not just upon creation and record declaration. If users choose not to tag content when they save it, content should be auto-filed based on the established, managed metadata associated with the existent corpus of content. Upon filing, retention policy can be transparently assigned based on metadata and content type. Users should be able to search for content (whether it is a record or not) by any term or combination of terms (faceted classification). To sum up, users need to feel they can depend on the system to manage their content by asking: Can the syscies, content quality, and relevancy. Perhaps all of the traditional IT enterprise and application architectural methodologies would not have been so bad after all. Establishing a governance model that defines who has responsibility for what can assist in identifying key areas of administration risk for the business. Understanding and accepting risk helps drive the discussion back to the core business question: What is the business problem that the organization wants SharePoint to solve? Understanding the key business problem drives the strategy or vision, governance, and design decisions essential for a successful implementation and longterm management of the solution. MOSS 2007 and the next release, MSS 2010, are not perfect or imperfect in and of themselves. With the introduction of MSS 2010, organizations should spend equal time reviewing the technical advances available and what they have learned from previous implementations. How organizations learn from their mistakes and adopt new approaches for deployment will be essential to effective migration to or implementation of MSS Resistance Is Futile For most organizations, the decision whether to implement Share- Point is long past. It is here to stay. However, with the release of MSS 2010, there is an opportunity to review fundamental, big-picture decisions. And, these decisions need to be considered collaboratively by IT, records, compliance, and business owners in answer to these questions: Should the organization implement or migrate to MSS 2010? If so, when and why? How does the organization approach instituting governance (i.e., how to close the barn door now that the horse has left the stall)? processes for preserving and protecting that content in a way that satisfies RM needs must be transparent and facilitated by minimal efforts required of users How does the organization ensure the reliability and usability for end users? Is MSS 2010 going to be the ECM solution for the organization, or will several technologies be used? For RM professionals, one of the most significant and compelling questions to be answered, though, is this: Are we really prepared to manage ALL content? Records managers have often failed to demonstrate the relevance of RM to users faced with dealing with live, active content, data, and processes. Users see RM as happening way downstream at the end of an object s useful life in order to reduce storage volumes. From the users point of view, declaring a record means extra work that benefits records managers (and perhaps legal and compliance personnel), not them. Certainly, the industry is changing. There are efforts to make enforcing RM less onerous. One example is the trend toward big bucket classification, which attempts to remove some of the complexity from choosing records classifications. But generally, users don t perceive RM as providing significant benefit to their daily lives. It s All About the Content How can this perception be changed? It may sound heretical to suggest it, but the concept of record should be forgotten; the focus should be on content. Rather than declaring records, users should be manag ARMA International, H T 7

10 tem be used knowing the results will be the same each time? If an ECM solution facilitates reliable, userfriendly interaction with content, or if an ECM system enables users to work more easily with content, then users may perceive enough benefit to adopt the solution. And, when that solution seamlessly enables RM policy, everyone wins. One Is a Lonely Number So, if organizations can implement MSS 2010 with the right governance to be a reliable, useable content management system, should they adopt it as their single ECM product? There is no right answer. For many business functions, MSS 2010 provides sufficient good stuff, including collaboration, sharing, and search capabilities, that will satisfy the business problem at hand. As a general repository for sharing content, MSS 2010 s capabilities may be sufficient. For other business processes, applications may already exist that facilitate the creation, processing, storage, and long-term management of content. Replacing these applications may be impractical. To simplify the end-user experience, enabling access through a common user interface could be a more compelling proposition than replacement. MSS 2010 may provide good flexibility and capability for content managed by it but organizations may still need other RM solutions for content managed outside of MSS In short, a polytheistic approach may be required. Similarly, whether an organization chooses to leverage a separate records repository or retain records in place does not have to be a black or white decision. Flexibility and heterogeneity is possible when governance is sound. This leads back to the issue of governance, and from governance, back to the quintessential question: What business problem is the organization trying to solve? With a firm understanding of the business problem, organizations can determine what processes need to be supported and what information needs to be available to facilitate those processes. With a solid understanding of these Records managers need to be part of the IT strategy development process and should play an integral role in the governance model. elements, an organization can determine if SharePoint has the technical capabilities to adequately address its business problem. If an organization believes this is the right technical solution, then it must create an environment that supports the right business implementation. What needs to be done to create that environment? At a minimum, an organization should: Ensure that a sound governance model is established and responsibilities are clearly defined Elicit the support from senior leadership to actively promote the solution Engage participation from all areas of the organization Complement the technical deployment with sufficient change management, including ongoing training and communications Obtain consensus around the success criteria and how success will be measured Develop and apply continuous improvement for the long-term health of the solution Software Is Only a Tool MSS 2010, like MOSS 2007, is just a tool. And it may be one of many tools. To be a business solution, it needs to be leveraged in context of the overall IT strategy and adequately managed through a sound and effective governance structure. Records managers need to be part of the IT strategy development process and should play an integral role in the governance model. Understanding the business problems that MSS 2010 is to resolve will ensure the records managers role is not relegated to just providing insight into retention policy. To drive the RM agenda, records managers need to drive the broader ECM agenda and be actively engaged in ensuring that all content is captured, secured, classified, managed, and retained to meet business goals. Marcia Douglas has more than 20 years of experience in information management, with a focus on enterprise content management, and currently serves as associate partner with Deloitte. She previously worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Bearingpoint, IBM, and LGS Group. Her range of experience also includes designing and implementing document management, web content management, records management, e-discovery, management, and business process management solutions using a variety of industry-leading products and integrating these solutions within existing legacy environments. With specialized skills in taxonomy, classification, and retention management, Douglas has developed ECM strategies for both public and private sector companies, including development of business cases and roadmaps. Douglas can be contacted at marciajdouglas@gmail.com. H T A R M A International,

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