Ryan Duguid, Microsoft’s Senior Product Manager for ECM, was the guest speaker at our very successful webinar on “SharePoint 2010: What’s New for Email Management?” During the webinar we received several questions from attendees, some of which Ryan was able to answer live. However, a number of questions were answered by Ryan via email after the webinar and you can read those questions and answers below.
How do we educate users on what emails need to be declared as a record?
The decision about what email should be declared as a record varies from one organization to the next depending on specific internal requirements as well as industry and government regulations. In general though, any email correspondence that is considered to be evidence of business activities and transactions would constitute a record. Two of the most prominent definitions of what constitutes a record are:
ISO 15489 – “information created, received, and maintained as evidence and information by an organization or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business”
International Council on Archives – “a recorded information produced or received in the initiation, conduct or completion of an institutional or individual activity and that comprises content, context and structure sufficient to provide evidence of the activity”
I’d also highly recommend reading and sharing the following document from ARMA:
http://www.arma.org/pdf/WhatIsRIM.pdf
Is there any way to force metadata entry without custom development? For Document IDs, we require a sequential ID without the prefix requirement across the farm. Can this be accomplished using document ID provider customization?
Custom development is not required to force metadata entry. All metadata attributes in SharePoint can be defined as required or optional. If an attribute is defined as required, then a document cannot be checked-in without a value being provided for that attribute.
The Document ID provider is a pluggable model so you can define your own provider that generates sequential numbers. The prefix is an optional component, defined at a Site Collection level, that allows you to ensure guaranteed uniqueness across Site Collections when using the out of the box Document ID provider.
Can the same copy of a document be part of multiple document sets?
The Document Set is a physical storage structure and as such, a document can only reside in a single Document Set. You can create pointers to a document that is stored in another Document Sets but there is no notion of a single document existing in multiple Document Sets.
How do we find the URL for a document ID? How do we save it, so we know what to search for in the future?
If you display the Document ID as a column in a library, the value is rendered as a hyperlink and the URL of the hyperlink specifies the document redirect service and the Document ID. You can copy this URL by right clicking the hyperlink and selecting Copy Shortcut.
Can folders have an object ID?
Folders do not have a Document ID.
One functionality that I lack in the Content Organizer is dynamic rules/destinations. So for instance this scenario: Content Type: email, Cust No: xxx Rule: route object of content type email to dynamic dest. Dest based on Cust. No. Can it be done OOB?
The Content Organizer has the ability to dynamically generate folders based on each unique value for a specific metadata attribute. In your example, the Content Organizer would provision a folder for each unique value of Cust. No. under a root path that you specific.
The metadata driven navigation shows OOB all terms that are available in the term store. Is there a way to only display those terms that are used in the current library/list? Without filtering the metadata driven navigation gets impossible to navigate.
Metadata driven navigation is configured on a per library basis and for each library you need choose which Term Sets are available as navigators. The choice of available Term Sets is based on the Term Sets used in the Document Library. When configuring Managed Metadata columns on a Document Library, you need to select a specific node in the taxonomy hierarchy to bind to for tagging. As a result, Metadata driven navigation does not show all available terms out of the box but rather it shows the specific nodes that have been chosen as key navigators.
Re: information management: how do you envision to update all the existing documents with the new policy rules and the retention periods. Is there going to be any mass migration tool?
SharePoint 2010 allows you to specify location based metadata default values and Information Management Policy. This means that Document Libraries and folders can be used to drive policy rules and retention periods. Any content that exists in a Document Library or folder will inherit the policy and retention period defined for the container and this will allow you to apply policy and retention periods to existing documents. We have also worked with our colleagues in the Windows Server team to provide core capabilities that will migrate content from file servers to SharePoint, leveraging the content organizer to route content to the appropriate location within SharePoint, inheriting the policy and retention period on migration. You can find more information at http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/ScriptCenter/en-us/f538c34c-4f74-4645-9649-fd25e49805d6.
In addition we have a range of partners that provide migration tools including Metalogix, AvePoint, Tzunami and Quest. These partners support advanced migration scenarios from existing content repositories and allow you to manipulate information architecture, metadata and Content Type as part of content migration process.
Could this be used and what would be the best method of taking all incoming emails and send them to a document library inside individual project subsites? It would need to take an email associated with a project and automatically route it to the library?
My suggestion would be to define a term set in the Managed Metadata Service that defines each project (and potentially sub project). I would then define routing rules in the Content Organizer that route content to specific Sites and Document Libraries based on the project name. Once these rules are set up, you can have users tag email using Colligo with the appropriate project name and have the Content Organizer route the email to the appropriate location.
We’re looking for an effective work program – a documented/repeatable process to help organizations take advantage of the new capabilities or EX/SP 2010 to address messaging records mgmt best practices. Where will I find that?
I would suggest leveraging the content on the following sites:
Enterprise Content Management Resource Center – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee263905.aspx
Records Management Resource Center – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff598594.aspx
Exchange Server Tech Center – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351165.aspx
In my first blog entry, I looked at the 4 key scenarios for email management in an organization and identified the key outcomes and supporting platforms and software for each scenario. In this next section, I would like to talk about content management from a Microsoft perspective, our notion of ECM for the masses, and how we think of delivering it from Microsoft.
