Document Management & Workflow

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E-Records Institute™

SharePoint Governance:

Leveraging

MS SharePoint 2010 for

Document Management &

Workflow

Including Electronic Records Management,

E-Discovery, Project Management Issues & More

A Comprehensive Management Guide

Robert F. Smallwood, MBAIMERGE Consulting

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Who we are

E-Records Institute™is a specialized consulting practice of IMERGE Consulting. IMERGE is North America's largest and most experienced team of experts in the broader fields of enterprise content management (ECM) and business process optimization. IMERGE is also a leading provider of education courses in records management, electronic document capture and e-discover. IMERGE has offices in major cities including Boston, San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Seattle, New Orleans and Washington, DC.

What we have achieved

Our track record speaks for itself: We have completed more successful projects, published more articles and given more expert presentations than any other enterprise content management consulting firm in the world. We are proud that our organizations include some of the world’s best and largest public and private organizations. Learn more about us atimergeconsult.comor contact an IMERGE professional today to discuss putting our expertise to work for you.

About the Author

Robert Smallwood, MBA, Master of Information Technology, Laureate of

Information Technologyis a founding Partner of IMERGE Consulting and has been recognized as one of the industry’s “25 Most Influential People” and “Top 3 Independent Consultants” byKM Worldmagazine. Some of his past organizations include Bank of America, AT&T, Xerox and IBM. He has published more than 100 articles and given more than 50 conference presentations on document, records and content management. He is the author of several books including,Safeguarding Critical E-Documents,and,Taming the Email Tiger,and the upcoming books, Managing Electronic Records, Information Governance for Business Documents & Records, to be published by Wiley & Sons.

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L

EVERAGING

MS SharePoint 2010

for

Document Management & Workflow

Executive Summary

Document management controls the life cycle of documents in organizations — how they are created, reviewed, published, and consumed, and how they are ultimately disposed of or retained.

SharePoint 2010 has greatly improved document management features over SharePoint 2007– it seems Microsoft listened to concerns of system administrators, users, and records managers. This report provides rich detail on how to best leverage new SP2010 features in implementing document management and workflow, and also how to administer SP2007 document management, workflow, information policies and more.

A well-designed document management system promotes finding and sharing

documents easily. It promotes knowledge management and information mining. It helps an organization meet its legal and compliance requirements. It provides features at each stage the document life cycle, from template creation to document authoring, reviewing, publishing, auditing, and ultimately destroying or archiving. SharePoint 2007 was a good starting point, and now SP2010 is a platform that helps organizations accomplish their document management and workflow implementation goals, with support for records management.

Document management planning considerations include how content will be organized in document libraries, the metadata to define for each type of content, the workflows that will be required during the content's lifecycle, and the policies to apply to the content.

Document management is a subset and component of the broader term of enterprise content management (ECM) and is related to document imaging, workflow, records management and digital asset management.

This Management Guide—the most complete and current available today—will assist document managers, records managers, system administrators, IT managers, compliance managers and others involved in document management, workflow, electronic records and e-discovery implementations using SharePoint 2010 to make intelligent, informed decisions.

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Document

Management

DEFINING DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

Document management controls the life cycle of documents in organizations how they are created, reviewed, published, and consumed, and how they are ultimately disposed of or retained.

AnElectronic Document Management System(EDMS or DMS) is software or a suite of programs designed to store and track electronic documents.In more detail, a document management system is used to track and store electronic documents such as word processing and spreadsheet files, digital report files, and scanned images of paper-based documents. Document management is a subset and component of the broader term of enterprise content management (ECM) and is related to document imaging, workflow, records management and digital asset management.

A well-designed document management system promotes finding and sharing documents easily. It organizes content in a logical way, and makes it easy to standardize content creation and presentation across an enterprise. It promotes knowledge management and information mining. It helps an organization meet its legal and compliance

requirements. It provides features at each stage the document life cycle, from template creation to document authoring, reviewing, publishing, auditing, and ultimately destroying or archiving.1

According to a survey by Forrester Research, more than 75% of organizations invested in document management in 2011, and this strong trend will continue for the foreseeable future

The Elements of a Document Management System An effective document management solution specifies:

 What types of documents and other content can be created.

 What templates to use for each type of document.

 What metadata to provide for each type of document.

 Where to store documents at each stage of a document’s life cycle.

 How to control access to a document at each stage of its life cycle.

 How to move documents within the organization as team members contribute to document creation, review, approval, publication, and disposition.

 What policies to apply to documents so that document-related actions are audited, documents are retained or disposed of properly, and content important to the organization is protected.

Document management is a component of ECM.

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 How documents are converted as they transition from one stage to another

 during their life cycles.

 How documents are treated as corporate records, which must be retained according to legal requirements and corporate guidelines.1

SharePoint Governance: First Steps

Like most things in life, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” In the case of SharePoint deployments for managing content, especially documents and records, organizations can avoid a lot of headaches and future information governance (IG) risks if they invest time and deliberation inplanninghow they will deploy SharePoint, and what its business objectives are, and then making all the necessary policy decisionsbeforepiloting a roll out of the site to users.

This planning process necessarily involves consulting with users about their collaboration, business process, document usage and information storage needs. It also may mean including the records and information management (RIM) staff for guidance on crucial records management issues, and legal staff for legal and compliance requirements.

Otherwise, users will start creating and storing documents without knowing what rules to follow, or why the rules exist, and they will find their own workarounds to satisfy their unique document management business requirements.

For instance, if you restrict file size requirements

too much, the users will store them somewhere—perhaps unsecured in the cloud. If you do not allow certain file types, and the users need them, they will find a place to store them. And soon you will have all sorts of variations of folder and file systems and scattered documents and records which results in “content chaos.”

This is more than a mess. It is a costly mess, since economically and efficiently retrieving e-documents and records during e-discovery for legal proceedings will be fraught with search and retrieval challenges. There are also regulatory compliance factors that must be incorporated into SharePoint governance decisions for most organizations.

Critical to success in most SharePoint deployments is the input and influence of aBusiness Analyst, and particularly one who is adept at business process management (BPM) and has a solid understanding of taxonomy principles. If they can bring a library science background to the table, so much the better.

1_{http://technet.microsoft.com February, 2009 3 Microsoft SharePoint DM White Paper}

Critical to success in most SharePoint deployments is the

input and influence of a

Document Management & Workflow

SharePoint Governance:

Leveraging

MS SharePoint 2010 for

Document Management &

Workflow

Including Electronic Records Management,

E-Discovery, Project Management Issues & More

A Comprehensive Management Guide

Who we are

What we have achieved

About the Author

L

EVERAGING

MS SharePoint 2010

for

Document Management & Workflow

Table of Contents

Executive Summary

Document

Management

SharePoint Governance: First Steps