Offline SharePoint

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

Dave Foster, our VP of Development, has created a short screencast that demonstrates a new feature in V4.2, the use of Keyword Metadata fields. This feature allows user created folksonomies to be accessible via the Colligo metadata editor. Users can set, edit, and modify terms from term stores on the server through a simple type-ahead interface from the Colligo Term selector.

Colligo Contributor retrieves potential term matches from the server and lets the users select the desired term. Selected metadata terms can then be used in filters and views to present items in a structure format.

View the screencast to see this new feature in action.

We are really pleased to announce the launch of Colligo Contributor Version 4.2! This is an important release for us as it provides support for Office/Outlook 2010 along with additional support for new SharePoint 2010 enterprise content management (ECM) features including keyword metadata, document sets, and in-place records management. It also includes some technical enhancements designed to accelerate synchronization and increase overall performance. Thanks to our world class development team for delivering a great new version of our award-winning SharePoint client solutions.

Read the press release for more information on the V4.2 release.

June continued to be a busy month at Colligo for conferences and events. Colligo’s Braeden Calyniuk, who’s responsible for business development in the Asia Pacific region, recently attended, presented, and exhibited at the New Zealand SharePoint Conference in Wellington and the Australian SharePoint Conference in Sydney. Both events were well attended with over 400 SharePoint professionals in New Zealand and 800 in Australia. Ryan Duguid, who recently co-hosted our extremely successful webinar on email management in SharePoint 2010, provided the keynote address in Wellington.

This was Colligo’s first time exhibiting in New Zealand and Australia and it was great for Braeden to meet face-to-face with the many partners and customers that he’s only talked with on the phone. It was also great to meet with Microsoft representatives in both countries, so a big thanks to Ryan Duguid for introductions to the Microsoft New Zealand people and to Gayan Peiris for introductions to the Microsoft Australia folks.

Colligo was the guest of Information Leadership Consulting at the New Zealand show and the guest of Unique World for the Australian conference. Both groups generously shared their booths with us and played the part of excellent hosts, making many introductions to key companies and important SharePoint contacts in their respective regions. So another big thanks to Grant Margison at Information Leadership and Eddie Geller at Unique World for their support and incredible hospitality. Many thanks also to Debbie Ireland for putting together two great conferences!

Colligo has built a very good profile in New Zealand and Australia with a solid core of customers and excellent partners. We received a lot of good plugs at various “Voice of the Customer” presentations and the knowledge level of Colligo and our SharePoint client solutions with the conference attendees was fantastic.

Here are some photos that were taken at the events. Braeden is sitting in the middle.

Conferences like Tech-Ed are a great way for us to connect with customers, learn about their experiences using our products and the results that their companies are achieving. At Tech-Ed 2010 in New Orleans, we had the good fortune of having Bob Burke from Newfoundland Power stop by the Colligo booth. Bob is an Application Analyst and was heavily involved in deploying Colligo Contributor to their field service staff.

Newfoundland Power operates an integrated generation, transmission and distribution system throughout the island portion of Newfoundland and Labrador. The company identified a problem in the time delay involved in updating and printing manuals for their field staff to take with them in their service vehicles. To solve the problem, the company implemented SharePoint and Colligo Contributor, so that the manuals could be updated electronically, uploaded to SharePoint, and then synched to each of the field service technician’s laptops using Contributor. This process ensured that field staff always had the latest version of the service manuals in their trucks.

As Bob told us at Tech-Ed, Contributor provided fast and easy access to up-to-date field service manuals and helped solve Newfoundland Power’s mobile document management problems.

Some of you may not know that you can generate a site configuration file for Colligo Contributor which can be used to specifiy sites to automatically sync, to set default folder metadata, and more. While this is fairly easy to do if you have synched a bunch of sites (just choose File > Export Site Configuration from the menu), it is a bit harder to set up from scratch.

Albert Jan Schot wrote a cool post on how to set the Colligo config XML file up. It could save a bunch of time if you are trying to set up default sites for users.

I’m very excited to announce that Colligo has been recognized on Profit Magazine’s List of Canada’s fastest growing companies.  The editor of Profit summed it up like this: “Heroes for hard times, role models for the recovery. That’s how we describe the firms featured on our 22nd annual ranking of the PROFIT 100: Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies.”  Just to be eligible for the list requires a five year track record of increasing sales along with a minimum of triple digit growth, so no “flash in the pan” companies allowed.

Thanks and congratulations to everyone at Colligo as well as to our customers and partners worldwide for contributing to our success. This is our first year of eligibility for the list, and I look forward to making this an annual annoucement for years to come!

The Colligo team is in New Orleans for Microsoft Tech-Ed this week and the only thing hotter than the weather is all the buzz about Office and SharePoint 2010. Conference attendance is definitely up from last year, with most of the sessions packed to the rafters and the exhibit hall a frenzy of activity, especially the first night with the vendor reception driving 10,000 attendees into Hall D.

Traffic to the Colligo booth has been excellent and the team has had some great conversations with people stopping by to learn more about our SharePoint solutions and how they can deploy them in their organizations. The vast majority are interested in Office and SharePoint 2010 support and we definitely have a good story to tell about Colligo products here. Email management in SharePoint is high on the list of companies either deploying SharePoint or looking to expand their use of it. Without exception, everyone loves our Contributor Add-In for Outlook!

The post conference festivities have been excellent too, as expected in a city as vibrant as New Orleans, which has definitely bounced back with a passion since Katrina. Last night’s AvePoint sponsored party at the famous Maison Dupay Hotel in the French Quarter was excellent, featuring great food and a very talented fire dancer. Later in the night, the party moved to Bourbon Street in style, with a jazz band and full police escort leading a parade of about 200 people through the streets of the French Quarter. It was quite the spectacle!

Look for more from the Colligo team when they return.

We’ve had a very busy couple months, attending a number of conferences and events all across the country. We were at the Architecture, Engineering and Construction Technology Conference in Las Vegas, and the Office and SharePoint 2010 launch events  in cities all over North America. Next week we’ll be in New Orleans for Tech-Ed 2010  and I’m sure that SharePoint 2010 will be a hot topic in the sessions and among the attendees.

SharePoint 2010 was definitely top of mind at the AIIM Expo that we also attended last month in Philadelphia. In fact, a whole conference track was devoted to SharePoint 2010 and included presentations from a number of high level Microsoft people (including our next webinar guest speaker Ryan Duguid and our past webinar guest speaker Tricia Bush) as well as from customers who had deployed SharePoint 2010 in their organizations.

One of the most interesting presentations was given by Nishan DeSilva who is Microsoft’s Director of Information Management and Compliance. Nishan’s presentation was titled:  “Eating Our Own Dog Food: Insights to the SharePoint 2010 Strategy within Microsoft Legal & Corporate Affairs.” In the presentation, Nishan outlined how Microsoft’s legal and corporate affairs department is leveraging SharePoint 2010 to address corporate compliance while empowering users to get their work done.

At one point in his presentation, Nishan talked about how Microsoft was planning to deploy Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook. At the end of the talk he was giving away some Microsoft swag, and one of the questions he asked the audience was:  “We plan to use a third party application in this deployment, can anyone remember what it is?”

To which a resounding “Colligo!” echoed through the hall!

That’s right folks, Microsoft has chosen to purchase Colligo as part of their legal and corporate affairs department’s SharePoint 2010 deployment!  

Of course, we can’t be happier to have Microsoft as both a customer and a partner.  As an important side note, the legal and corporate affairs department’s SharePoint 2010 deployment is being used as the model for deploying SharePoint 2010 throughout Microsoft, hence the “Eating Our Own Dog Food” title to Nishan’s presentation.

Nishan is definitely no stranger to Colligo. Prior to moving to Microsoft, he was the Global Director, Records & Content Management at Watson Wyatt Worldwide (now Towers Watson). While at Watson Wyatt, he spearheaded the development and deployment of RecordsExcellence, a global records management system built on SharePoint 2010. As part of the enterprise wide deployment, Nishan once again chose Colligo Contributor as a critical part of the RecordsExcellence system. Colligo Contributor makes it easy for staff to move emails and files into RecordsExcellence and to ensure that these emails and files are properly tagged with metadata, for better findability and regulatory compliance. The added bonus is that Colligo Contributor helps drive adoption of RecordsExcellence and makes the staff more efficient and productive.

We’ve written a complete case study of the Watson Wyatt implementation that can be read here.

Nishan also made a presentation at the 2010 SharePoint Conference on RecordsExcellence and how Colligo is being used. The video presentation can be viewed here.

Also at the AIIM conference, Carey Bachman, the Corporate Records Manager at Towers Watson did a very interesting presentation on best practices for enterprise records management with SharePoint. Carey used their RecordsExcellence system to illustrate many of the points she was making regarding best practices and we are very grateful to her for highlighting the role of Colligo Contributor in the success of the RecordsExcellence deployment.  Thanks Carey!

So I’d like to thank Nishan and Carey for their continuing support, and invite any of our current and future customers to come and visit the Colligo booth at Tech-Ed 2010 in New Orleans (booth #324).  See you there!