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The Business Side -- Is there a separate "Compliance / RM edition" of Office SharePoint Server 2007?

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There are many challenges in getting an RM department and an IT department to work together: cultural issues, procedural issues, and more. But one of the first challenges for working with IT is simply acquiring RM software -- in many organizations,  hardware & software purchases, including systems used for RM, are accounted for in the IT department's budget. And the metrics that IT often uses to make purchasing decisions usually don't favor RM considerations. (This may be changing thanks to the increased importance of compliance for many organizations, but it's likely to remain a challenge for Records Managers for the near future.)

Fortunately, organizations that choose Office SharePoint Server 2007 won’t have to deal with this disconnect. :-)

We've stated on this blog from the beginning that for a records management program to succeed in an organization, all of the organization's content management systems need to have appropriate RM capabilities. For that reason, all of the Records Management capabilities described in this blog are available in Office SharePoint Server 2007. There will NOT be separate RM or “compliance” editions of Office SharePoint Server specific to records management.

This can have a major impact on how records managers and IT departments justify investments in RM software. IT departments have several reasons to deploy the Office SharePoint server 2007 in addition to its Records Management abilities. (Here’s a link to the "Top 10 benefits of Office SharePoint Server". Only item #3 talks about Records Management.) So within your organization the RM group won’t be the only people asking IT to deploy this system. And from the IT department’s perspective, the “Return on Investment” for RM within Office SharePoint Server 2007 is much more palatable – you aren’t requiring them to deploy an RM application in addition to their Content Management systems; and the business benefits include more than reduced legal & regulatory risk.

So not only can the 2007 release help you be more successful at implementing records management programs in your organizations, but you'll also have an easier time getting IT to acquire & deploy this system in the first place.

Thanks for reading!

- Ethan Gur-esh, Program Manager.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2006
    Good question - thanks for asking!  We just posted an article about the Records Center Add-on Pack, and that post should clarify our position.  There will be new features in the add-on pack and it will be freely available. All of us who are familiar with the DoD 5015.2 standard know that certifying against the criteria requires the application to support quite a few very specific features.  Some of these features are – frankly – not that useful to a majority of our customers.  By providing DoD 5015.2 compliance in an add-on pack, it’s a way we can address both ends of the records management spectrum.  Customers who want the advanced records management functionality can make use of the pack.  Customers who don’t want the added level of complexity can take advantage of the straightforward experience of the standard Records Center. Hope that helps! -Adam Harmetz Program Manager

  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2006
    Mic.dan posted elsewhere on this site (http://blogs.msdn.com/recman/archive/2006/08/24/715883.aspx#1160134) a query about using MOSS 2007 with complimentary products like Meridio (obstensibly to beef up the EDRM weaknesses of MOSS 2007).  It would certainly be useful to hear the RM Team's thoughts on this and the extent of this integration.  Fom my understanding of both products it occurs to me that there is still a significant functionality gap even from a jointe dup solution in terms of managing physical records.  I can certainly see how MOSS & Meridio would be a sweet fit in a purely electronic object sense (assuming one can live with the concept contested elsewher on this blog that defines Records as final documents c.f. a continuum approach). Cheers

  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2006
    @Russel Hi Russel - I'll really be glad to hear what other people think about Meridio & MOSS integration. I'm still checking it up, and the integration seems to be more and more convincing - it's simply seamless in the user eyes, and accomplishes all the lacks in MOSS DRM. About physical records - Meridio handles that as far as I figured (it calls "marks"), but what Ethan says (http://blogs.msdn.com/recman/archive/2006/10/05/Physical-Records-Management-in-the-2007-Office-system.aspx)  makes sense - Physical Records are just another type of “item”, and MOSS enables a Barcode mechanism which is sufficient for most organisations, I believe. Anyway - Ethan & team - we are waiting for your answers, if we may... bye!

  • Anonymous
    May 23, 2008
    There are many challenges in getting an RM department and an IT department to work together: cultural issues, procedural issues, and more. But one of the first challenges for working with IT is simply acquiring RM software -- in many organizations, hardwar