SharePoint 2010 Records Management

The records centre in SharePoint 2007 was always a bit of a first step in records management for SharePoint as far as I was concerned.

The limitations still outweighed the benefits and we were constantly looking to other products to supplement the features of SharePoint as a product set.

Now with SharePoint 2010 there is a whole new set of features that makes the management of records in SharePoint exciting and easy to deploy.

Administrators can now put in place the “in place” records practice so that content is still kept in context of the collaboration space. Or if required the document can be shipped to an other repository and a stub left in place in the collaboration location to still allow users to access the document as required.

Just these features are a significant improvement from the 2007 way of how things worked.

The big lever to assist in the records management area is the use of an Enterprise Metadata Management (EMM) service. This service allows administrators to define enterprise content types and enterprise metadata and through the sue of these and content organisers and content rules define the necessary record keeping tools to make the creation and disposition of records in SharePoint easy and painless to the end user.

Go Microsoft is what i can say from the look that I have been able to glean from the SPC sessions that I have been to.

Every Cloud has an IT lining

So I have had a quick look at the cloud and checked out a cloud provider that once was an ASP provider. In looking into this and other providers I got to thinking that every cloud has an IT lining.

Well there is going to be hardcore IT in that Cloud somewhere. That means tin, string, people and process to manage it all.

However, the great thing with the cloud is that you can be in your living room with a Pentium 4 under the living room table and an “Awesome” online brochure-ware for cloud services.

How do I differentiate between the “cloud clowns” and the real cloud providers.

Cloud will be dominated by big brand names, because the level of trust needs to be there to drive the security and comfort that people need to make the plunge will be available through high grade shark type telco and infrastructure or software providers.

Both Microsoft and Google are making a big play into the Cloud space. At the current Microsoft SharePoint conference the “on premise” or “in the cloud” mantra is very evident and SharePoint 2010 has significant multi-tenant features that will allow customers to choose as they se fit as to location and deployment of application. But as we said every cloud has an IT lining, just make sure that your is secure.

SPC303 – SharePoint 2010 IT Pro Overview

The IT Pro has many new features that are Cool in SP2010. Scalability, ease of management and support have been baked into the product.

Powershell is definitely a “must use” tool for SP2010. It seems to feature all over the place and that is not a bad thing.

The biggest change from a software infrastructure is the Services Architecture that now provides for solid and extensible Metadata Management model outside of the Web Application and Farm level; about time I say.

So you can create and manage metadata asset items outside of the Site Collection / Web App / Farm and have them published and consumed across multiple farms, now we are starting to talk about a scalable architecture for information management.

As well as a new and cool services architecture the way that you administer this architecture and other system features has also had a massive revamp and the SharePoint admin now has a good UI to manage all the necessary parts of the software and content infrastructure.

SharePoint 2010 is coming of age and the release is a significant shift in the services and capabilities that are provided. For the other vendors out there it is time to start watching you back.

SharePoint 2009 Conference - Keynoting

Well it is day one of the SharePoint 2009 Conference, with a theme of Connect, Collaborate, SharePoint.

We have had the keynote and the take away from this session is how much SharePoint is a key part of Microsoft’s strategy going forward.

Steve Ballmer was loud but quite reserved I thought. He was definitely looking to position SharePoint as the platform of the future.

Some of the key advancements in the platform, such as:

SharePoint On Premise or in the Cloud – You choose and deploy. You can have it here or there or in both places at once, connected together.

Metadata management that finally makes sense -Create and manage metadata that can be then used across farms, web apps and down into the site collections.

Business Connectivity Services – This replaces or extends on the Business Data Catalogue and is now two way updating

SharePoint Workspaces – This allows you to take SharePoint and connected business data offline. A very cool feature and one that will allow you to create some powerful composite applications.

Overall a good start to the Conference and there is over 7,400 people attending. Even just being 1/3rd back from the front the people on stage were very small. It was good to have the big, big screens. More later it is now session time ….

Checking out the cloud – a reality check

The Web Archive, also known as “the way back when machine” is a great research tool.

Recently I want to check out so called “cloud provider” and see what they were offering “way back when” in 2001.

Well in 2001 this cloud provider was an ASP provider! No, they did not do Active Server Pages, although they did provide web enablement, they were in fact an Application Service Provider, quoting from the then home page.

“<company> offers comprehensive internet, application and infrastructure management services, in one solution, to keep your business not only in the game…”

If I follow the company from 2001 they moved from ASP provider to “on-demand” and “utility” provider to “on-demand” and “cloud” computing provider.

I commend the company for moving with the times and providing a new story for the same services that have changed some over the years, however they are still offering “old rope” for new.

The cloud is a great marketing story very much like “ASP” and Information Lifecycle Management “ILM”. Where are these terms today? ILM raced in and out like a bad curry. Driven by the storage providers on the back of the records management renaissance, post Sarbanes Oxley reports, whizzed up by the marketing department like a quick soufflé. But now cloud is in folks.

• Cloud infrastructure
• Cloud Application Services
• Cloud storage
• Cloud <enter your choice here>

So we are going to see cloud for awhile. Google Trends www.google.com/trends with a search term of “cloud” show the increase from end 2008 in searches and news stories. We are on the up of the hype cycle, get ready for the rollercoaster ride down the other side. Excitement will abound for some time to come. By the way this article is brought to you by the “blog cloud”, yeah right !

It’s about solving business problems.

Came across a really nice quote today on the MS SharePoint blog site.

“Customers come first. There is a lot of exciting technology in SharePoint but the objective is not a building a computer science project. What matters is solving business problems.”

Right on Jeff, (go here for the full story). It is all about solving the business problems. After all business (in the context of ECM) is all about people working with content in concert with  business processes, as those people try to do their job and be successful.

ECM should be about helping people to be successful by providing them a set of seamless services that enable them to deal with content and the associated business processes in an effective and efficient way.

Given today’s landscape of business problems there is NOT and I repeat NOT one technology to rule them all.

We have a need, more than ever, to find a way to easily combine and in most cases reuse, adapt, federate, combine the technology sets that have been deployed in business to solve the business problem, not just deploy the technology.

Too often ECM is pitched as a single technology suite to solve all problems, this is not the case. Technology is the last piece of the puzzle. In a blog site that I use for just capturing my thoughts about ECM I explain the linkage of people, process and technology this in a model.

But coming back to the title of this blog. ECM is all about solving business problems, I think that we should not lose sight of that and we should strive to get connected to the people and these problems first, after all as Jeff says in his blog we are not building a computer science project!