Offline SharePoint

Ed Kaczor, our VP of Sales, spent last week in Washington, DC at the 2010 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.  Over 13,000 people participated in this year’s conference, far surpassing last year’s attendance, which is a very good sign for the coming year.  The conference featured some high profile speakers, including a keynote by former President Bill Clinton titled “Embracing our Common Humanity” in which he discussed where he sees the world going and the role  that technology plays in reducing global disparities.

Another very interesting keynote speaker was Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer.  Kevin’s presentation covered a lot of ground but some important take-aways were Microsoft’s impressive success in building market share and the continuing success of SharePoint in the global market place.  SharePoint has been Microsoft’s fastest server product to hit $1 billion in revenue and Kevin predicts it will also be the fastest to $2 billion.  Another important take-away was Microsoft’s commitment to “cloud computing” with a focus on its BPOS Business Productivity Online Suite offering. 

Colligo is well positioned to take advantage of Microsoft’s emerging cloud strategy since our products already work with BPOS and we have lots of happy customers to prove it! We also saw a lot of interest in our products from other SharePoint hosting companies proving once again that “cloud computing” will be a hot topic in the coming year.

Ed’s discussions with our global partners provided further validation of the traction that we’re seeing in the market for SharePoint 2010 as a platform for enterprise content management (ECM).  This is great news as ECM and document management in SharePoint is a natural sweet spot for us with our Outlook to SharePoint and Windows Explorer to SharePoint integration solutions.

As Barry mentioned, I’m going to do a series of posts over the new few weeks based on the information that I presented at the webinar on Email Management in SharePoint 2010. These posts and the associated audio files and presentation slides break down the webinar into smaller sections and enable people to download the audio and slides and listen/view at their convenience.

In this first section, I’ll discuss how Microsoft is thinking about ECM and in particular email management in terms of how an organization can get it under control. Their are 4 key scenarios that we consider when we think about how to manage emails in an organization. These 4 key scenarios I like to call the continuum, starting on the left hand side with Personal Email Management, then moving right to Project and Case Management, then to Email Archiving and finally to Records Management.

Each of these scenarios has key outcomes and supporting software that Microsoft believes a company needs to manage emails within an organization.

Personal Email Management:
This is essentially driven by the individual and it’s characterized by how I think about email for my own personal purposes. How I consume what comes into my Inbox, how I manage my Inbox and how I act on the content in my Inbox. Personal email management is all about making my day simpler using many of the great new features of Outlook 2010 designed to make managing information easier as well as easier to tag or classify email to help me get my job done.

Key Outcomes:

• Well, managed and organized Inbox
• Information is easy to find
• Email is safe, secure and easy to recover
• Easy to elevate email to a higher purpose
• Easy to age email gracefully

Supporting Platforms and Software:

• Outlook 2010
• Exchange 2010

Project and Case Management:
This is all about dealing with teams, groups, projects, and specific issues within an organization. What’s important to note is that in this scenario, we treat email the same as any other content item such as a Word file, an Excel file, or a PowerPoint presentation. It’s all part of a single entity, whether that’s a single project or single case. I want to manage email in the same way as any other file related to a project. What’s required in this scenario is a consistent approach to managing all those different types of content, a consistent metadata capture requirement across all the content, and a consistent way to apply search and policy to the document or item. Email gets shared along with all the other content to the group.

Key Outcomes:

• Treat email the same as all other artifacts
• Share email broadly without replication
• Capture rich metadata
• Leverage workflow
• Apply rich policy

Supporting platforms and software:

• Outlook 2010
• SharePoint 2010
• Colligo Contributor

Email Archiving:
This is something that is more driven by IT and the business as well as by compliance and the regulations placed on the business around how you manage electronic communication. From an IT perspective, it’s about how to manage large volumes of emails coming into a business.

Key Outcomes:

• Simplify application of policy
• Broad brush, time based disposition
• Support larger archives with cheaper disk
• Support e-discovery requests

Supporting platforms and software:

• Outlook 2010
• Exchange 2010

Records Management:
This goes beyond the “broad brush” approach of email archiving to records management where it is more about identifying business critical content. This content must have specific metadata capture requirements, specific multi-stage policy applied in order to manage the entire lifecycle, and a set rules and regulations that are adhered to very closely. This also requires that a specific individual in the organization is taking care of this content, monitoring it over its lifecycle, and making sure that the right content is kept for the right period of time and then disposed of in an effective fashion.

Key Outcomes:

• Manage email as a business record
• Leverage file plans for classification
• Capture rich metadata
• Leverage workflow
• Apply rich policy
• Support e-discovery requests

Supporting platforms and software:

• Outlook 2010
• SharePoint 2010
• Colligo Contributor

For more information on these scenarios, please listen to the audio file below and review the slides. In the next posting, I’ll discuss what “ECM for the Masses” means for Microsoft.

Download the slides here (PDF, Right-Click & Save As)
Download the audio

Many of you may have watched our recent webinar with Ryan Duguid, titled “SharePoint 2010: What’s New for Email Management?” In fact, we had a record number of registrations for the event at almost 2600, so we definitely know that email management in SharePoint 2010 is a hot topic! Not only is Ryan very busy being Microsoft’s Senior Product Manager for ECM, but he’s also a very much in-demand speaker, recently providing the keynote address at the New Zealand SharePoint Conference in Wellington.

Ryan has agreed to be a guest blogger and do series here based on the webinar. Over the next few weeks, Ryan will publish blog posts that break down the webinar into more manageable pieces, as well as provide links to the slides he used and to the specific audio portion of his presentation. You can either listen online or download the audio and listen at your convenience.

Here is Ryan’s bio:

Ryan Duguid is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft responsible for SharePoint Enterprise Content Management. Ryan moved to Redmond from Microsoft New Zealand where he was a Technology Specialist responsible for evangelizing the Microsoft 2007 Office system, assisting customers with deployment and adoption of Office system-based solutions and developing competency and confidence within the Microsoft partner ecosystem. He is passionate about understanding people, identifying their unique problems and helping them to realize their true potential through effective and innovative use of technology.

Thanks Ryan for agreeing to be a guest blogger, we are looking forward to your posts!

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

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.

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!