EDRM and SharePoint: Designing and Building a Compliant Platform

The amount of information generated by organizations is growing at a phenomenal rate. With factors such as increased legislation and penalties, many organizations want to leverage their information assets, both physical and digital, to their full advantage by increasing speed of access, improving classification schemes, and assuring information quality and trustworthiness. To do so, organizations are adopting toolsets such as Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM) applications, Microsoft SharePoint, and other document management tools for creating a central trusted repository, which is a key goal of records managers.

There are many roadblocks to attaining that goal, such as executive sponsorship and enforcement, organizational alignment, confusion over toolsets, lack of a consistent and user-relevant classification scheme, poor usability, and low user adoption. Most organizations have islands of EDRM systems in various states of deployment that are generally not delivering the value they promised. That's why having a good planning and deployment strategy in place is crucial. 

Planning your Records Management Solution

Planning a records management solution is a daunting task. To be successful, you need a multidiscipline team because designing the system requires multiple skills and diverse knowledge (e.g., communications, governance, information architecture, records management, data migration, security, EDRM system architecture). A good place to start the planning process is to read ISO 15489 and the DIRKs methodology. (See the Related Resources Box.) Here are some key points that you need to consider when planning your EDRM rollout:

• Governance—You need an executive sponsor to drive your records management program across the organizations.
• Team—You need to work with a multidiscipline team as discussed earlier.
• Plan—You must have a plan that will deliver the expected value for the organization.
• User adoption program—You must create a program that encourages and measures user uptake, provides education and mentoring, and enforces and enforces best practices (performance reviews).
• Data policy—You must define, communicate, and enforce the data policy for records. People must understand their roles and responsibilities.
• Inventory of data repositories—You need to conduct an inventory of what you have, the state it's in (age, usefulness), and location. The inventory might include file shares, public folders, microfiche, third-party records storage warehouse, and departmental EDRM systems to name a few.

Records Center 2007 Overview

Although Microsoft has released SharePoint 2010, there is merit in covering SharePoint 2007 technologies because many organizations won't upgrade for another year or so. SharePoint 2007 has a Site Template called Records Center. It has functionality such as Holds, which lets you place holds on retention schedules, and Auditing, which logs events and operations against the record. It also contains some specialized libraries and content type routing configuration that allows you to route records by content type. 

For example, you could create a content type called Contracts and a library for the content type. You would then create a routing rule in Records Center that would route the content type to the Contracts library. You could then apply Information Management policy (i.e., how to handle records) to the library. The final step in the process is to configure the farm to be aware of the Records Center by adding the link to the Records Center Web Service (e.g., http://server_name/_vti_bin/officialfile.asmx). To do so, select External Service Connections and enter the URL to your records center web service in the Connect to a Records Repository field. Upon completion, the option to route records within document libraries will now appear in the item's edit/context menu as Figure 1 shows. Note that any work you do should be done in a sandbox environment, which is usually a virtual machine (VM) running on your laptop.

Create a Records Center

This section outlines the basic process for creating a Records Center in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. For more detailed information, see the Microsoft TechNet article "Create a site collection (Office SharePoint Server)". To create a Records Center, follow these steps:

1. Login as Administrator and open Central Administration. Select Application Management.
2. Enter a name for the application, SQL credentials, and authentication method that suits your environment). Using Quotas is also a best practice, but isn't a requirement for a sandbox environment. Note that isolating Records Center with its own site and application will help simplify operations.
3. Under Site Collection, select create a Site Collection. Enter a name, description, and URL, then select the Records Center template. (Chose a URL and port number that fits with your environment. Also, associate your Site Collection with the application you created in the prior step).
4. Select Application Management and click External Service Connections. Enter the URL to your Records Center Web Service in the Connect to a Records Repository field (e.g., http://server_name/_vti_bin/officialfile.asmx). Note that in SharePoint 2007 you can specify only one connection per farm.
5. Open your Records Center site in the browser and click Site Settings. Create a content type called Contracts, and accept the default settings. Click Site Settings, select Create, and create a document library called Contracts. Complete the following tasks:
6. Configure the Contracts document library to accept multiple content types. Configure the Contracts document library to use the Contracts content type you created in the previous step.
7. Create a routing rule called Contracts that directs the Contracts content type to the Contracts document library by specifying the name of the library as the destination.

You now have a functional Records Center site. If desired, you can add the Records Site to your Portals navigation by editing the Portals navigation menu and adding a tab for the new Records Center site.