Space is limited, so please register today!

• Wednesday, October 5th
  11:45AM-1:45PM
  Room: 205AB at the Anaheim Convention Center

Join three respected experts on SharePoint as they share valuable tips, tricks, and practical advice that will drive the success of your SharePoint deployment. Enjoy a great meal, network with peers, and gain real-world insight on how organizations like yours are getting more out of SharePoint.

Luncheon topics include:

From Adoption to Engagement
Robert Bogue, SharePoint MVP

Organizations talk about driving SharePoint adoption, but is that what they really want? Discover how to move beyond adoption to real user engagement, to realize your SharePoint business goals.

Secrets to Success: Inside the Charter Online Information Network (COIN)
Dan Vasey, Director, Records & Information Management, Charter Communications

Creating a SharePoint-based records and information management system that encompasses emails, documents and physical assets requires planning, imagination, enterprise-wide commitment and third-party support. Dan will discuss the development, implementation and principles behind the successful COIN project, including using Colligo solutions for email records management.

Building an Enterprise-Scale Records Management Solution Using SharePoint 2010 & Colligo
Nishan De Silva, Senior Director, Information Management & Compliance, Office of General Council, Microsoft

The legal industry and records world is embracing both SharePoint and Colligo for enterprise-scale records management. Join Nishan as he provide insights into Microsoft Legal and Corporate Affairs’ award-winning SharePoint implementation and how organizations around the world are using it as a model for email and records management in SharePoint.

This important event will leave you with tangible advice you can implement to achieve measurable results in your organization.

Space is limited—don’t miss out! Register today.

Congratulations to our friends at GimmalSoft – their GimmalSoft Compliance Suite is now DISA JITC certified for DoD 5015.2 compliance! Colligo’s email management solution for Outlook is integrated as part of the GimmalSoft Compliance Suite to provide the email records management functionality required by the DoD 5015.2 standard. The GimmalSoft solution is targeted at both federal government and commercial customers requiring a DoD 5015.2-compliant platform.

DoD 5015.2 is the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) Design Criteria Standard for Electronic Records Management Software Applications. It is endorsed by government agencies worldwide, including the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and its standards have been used as a basis for many global records management benchmarks. Following its adoption by the public sector, many private sector businesses now routinely use the certification as the “Gold Standard” for records management solutions.

Congratulations again to GimmalSoft for achieving this important certification. Everyone at Colligo is looking forward to working with you on a number of great projects in the months to come.

Chris Riley, CloudShare

In my first blog post, I discussed how SharePoint 2010 has matured for ECM and some points to keep in mind regarding SharePoint and enterprise content management, namely that SharePoint is a platform and not an application and that ECM is not a technology but a set of practices and methodologies.

In this blog entry, I’ll talk some more about the top things you need to consider when building your ECM in SharePoint including:

1. Plan more, implement less.  You should plan to the point that you have a complete blue-print of how SharePoint will be configured for your organization, even before installing SharePoint.  You should have at the ready your governance plan, taxonomies, farm Information architecture, security model, and retention schedule.  These are the minimum building blocks of an ECM solution.

2. Taxonomies are set up front.  Retroactively applying taxonomies is painful.  To design taxonomy you must engage the owners of the documents.  Agree to the terms, usually on a department level, and build in Excel.  Taxonomies are deployed in SharePoint as the managed meta-data service application.

3. Information Architectures are not one-size-fits all.  Information architecture is the configuration of your web applications, site collections, sites, sub-sites, and libraries.  In addition the settings of your views, and content types.  Information architecture is highly dependent on document volumes and the configuration of your organization.  Diagramming the information architecture out is a crucial first step in deploying the SharePoint Platform.

4. Records management is based on many things.  There are several aspects to records management; retention schedules, and record declaration.  Both happen in two places in SharePoint.  Retention schedules are determined by information management policies, and usually assigned by content type.  Records declaration can happen via a records center or in-place records management.  Some organizations use both, while others will choose one.  The right decision is based solely on your records managers, and your retention schedule.  For example many organizations consider ANY document in the system to be discoverable as a record; this would favor in-place records management over a records center.  Some organizations prefer to have retention applied to only a subset of documents as well as records declaration, this would favor records center.  In either case it’s recommended to have a separate library just for disposed records to support a two tier disposition system.  This library will only be accessible to certain staff.

In my next blog post, I’ll discuss a few more tips for building your enterprise content management system in SharePoint.

You can request a copy of the whitepaper here: http://www.rimtech.ca/GimmalSoft.html.

As mentioned on this site before, Bruce Miller is a pioneer in the electronic recordkeeping software business. He co-founded Provenance Systems in 1989 which developed ForeMost and is now owned by EMC/Documentum Corp. Then he founded Tarian Software in 1999 which was the first e-Records technology certified against the revised DoD 5015.2 June 2002 standard. Tarian was later acquired by IBM.

Bill England

Over the past week, we’ve been working with a customer on a particularly interesting use case for SharePoint that I thought others in the SharePoint community might be interested in learning more about it. The customer is using Zantaz (from Autonomy/HP) for email archiving with a primary focus around eDiscovery, email retention and legal hold. A number of factors are driving the customer to review their current implementation including the age of the system, cost and concerns about the system’s future given the flux in strategy at HP these days.

All the standard email archiving vendors are invited to bid, but I have become convinced, given the tightly bounded requirements laid out by the customer, that a Microsoft-centric solution would more than address their requirements, as well as provide substantial cost savings since much of the software is covered under their existing Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) (Exchange, SharePoint, Office, etc.).

Roughly speaking, here is how the current Zantaz solution works:

• Emails arrive in the end user’s Inbox and the users can delete the emails before 30 days to ensure there are no permanent record of any kind unless they are on legal hold (this reduces the volume of junk into storage)
• After 30 days, the emails are stubbed into the Zantaz archive and are loaded back into Outlook when the user clicks on them
• Emails that users believe to have business value are filed into 3, 5, 7, and 15 year retention folders
• Emails not filed to the retention folders, but older than 1 year are deleted (the default retention schedule is 1 year)
• eDiscovery, legal hold, etc. are done via Zantaz tools on the Zantaz archive

To replace the Zantaz solution with SharePoint, a company could simply:

• Configure Exchange for single item recovery for 1-year and then delete thereafter
• Deploy Colligo (for email management) so that users can easily file emails into the 3, 5, 7, and 15 year retention folders which are now based in the SharePoint Records Center
• Complete their eDiscovery, legal hold, etc. in SharePoint 2010 & Exchange, possibly with FAST search

For an enhanced solution, I would recommend replacing the 3, 5, 7 and 15 year retention folders with metadata tagging / content types such as invoice, contract, proposal, etc. Then the records manager or compliance officer can determine (and easily bulk change) the retention and disposition schedule for these items as opposed to relying on the end user to know the appropriate folder to file them. 

In addition to meeting requirements, for an organization that already owns Exchange, SharePoint and Office under their EA, there are compelling cost savings to be had. The annual maintenance alone for an email archive system can run into the $100k+ per annum. With an initial upfront investment in Colligo licenses, as well as some consulting dollars to configure SharePoint for email records management and search, organizations can be quickly up and running and saving money.

Zantax is just one email archiving solution, but there are many others in use by companies that could quite easily move to SharePoint and leverage the investment they have already made in the Microsoft stack.

Chris Riley, CloudShare

I’m really pleased to have Chris Riley participate as a guest contributor to the Colligo blog.  Chris (@HoardingInfo) is a pure technologist and recognized industry expert in SharePoint ECM, SharePoint Governance, SharePoint Information Architecture, Document Imaging, Analytics, and Cloud Virtualization. He’s also the Product Manager and Evangelist at CloudShare, a cloud computing company with extensive expertise in SharePoint. And with that brief introduction, I’ll turn the blog over to Chris.

Thanks Barry and thanks for being invited to participate in the Colligo blog. I’m always happy to talk about important SharePoint issues, especially issues related to deploying SharePoint as an ECM.

With the introduction of SharePoint 2010, the platform is now fully accepted as a solution for Enterprise Content Management (ECM).  But what does that really mean? In this blog series, I’ll try to answer that question and provide some tips to a successful SharePoint ECM deployment.

All versions of SharePoint have allowed the upload of documents. One would think if an enterprise application allowed you to upload a document, it’s good for ECM.  While content storage is the foundation of ECM, there is much more too it.  Earlier versions of SharePoint had some aspects of ECM but were missing a few critical elements.  Namely:

• Persistence
• Robust meta-data model
• In-Place Records Management
• Audit Trails
• Retention Schedules

The inclusion of these features to SharePoint 2010, in addition to the already existing document check-in, check-out, versioning, collaboration, and security, make SharePoint 2010 a great fit for ECM.  However, like all ECM platforms, to actualize a robust solution you have to do a little work. 

Here are two things to keep in mind always.

1. SharePoint is a platform NOT an application.  This means, it’s a collection of robust features that need to be formed into a solution.  The right combination of features and settings, with the proper planning will make an ideal ECM solution.  Trying to use it as an application is not the right way to go.  A lot of ECM requirements will be met with out-of-the-box SharePoint features, but there might also be times when 3^rd party plug-ins (like Colligo for email management) are very useful, especially in the area of content on-boarding.

2. ECM, while implemented via technology, is not technology, it is a set of practices and methodologies for gathering, storing, securing, and delivering content.  There is no one technology that makes ECM; it’s a combination of technologies in the correct orientation that make great ECM solutions.

With this proper state of mind, an organization is ready to form SharePoint into a great ECM solution. In the next blog entry, I’ll talk about some of the top things you need to consider when building your ECM in SharePoint.

Along with SharePoint, Microsoft was highlighting their mobile and slate technology at the conference.  As a recent Windows 7 adopter (and advocate), I was able to get up to speed on my Samsung Focus device and the upcoming Windows 8 / Mango release.  Windows 8 is slick and there will be more than enough apps available. In fact, I’m using the American Airlines app right now for paperless check in.  There is a lot of hype is around Android and Apple these days, but I am optimistic that Microsoft is finally on the right track and will quickly grow their market share. 

As a general observation, the legal industry has been slow to pick up on many new technologies and for example, is still heavily invested in the Blackberry world. However, their upgrade and budget cycles are playing in Microsoft’s favor based on the conversations I had with visitors to our booth.  While I believe that Microsoft will do better than expected in legal with their mobile strategy, the same is not true in the slate / tablet market.  iPad uptake is very strong and it is starting to be used heavily in legal for document review.  There are certainly technical issues, but lawyers have these devices at home and are starting to use them for work. This is a classic consumerization of IT story.

Colligo was at the show to discuss SharePoint as a document management system (DMS) for legal (specifically our email management solutions for SharePoint) and to support Microsoft in moving firms from Autonomy and OpenText to SharePoint.  The legal DMS market is slow moving, but firms are definitely starting to move.  For a few years now, we’ve seen smaller firms moving to SharePoint since the legacy legal DMS systems are prohibitively expensive and the improvements offered in SharePoint 2010 have made it a viable option as a legal DMS. 

At ILTA this year, Clifford Chance was a headline story as they have recently adopted SharePoint as their DMS.  To my knowledge, this is the first large legal firm to go public on their SharePoint deployment.  It certainly is not a tipping point, but momentum is building and Clifford Chance is a very established global firm and an excellent reference for SharePoint. 

In listening to the presentation, I was struck by the approach Clifford Chance took to their project.  Rather than trying to replicate all the functionality in their current DMS (which was heavily under-utilized, as so many are), they gathered requirements and invested time in really understanding what their users were trying to accomplish day-to-day and designed their SharePoint DMS and supporting tool set to address these requirements .

This enabled Clifford Chance to leverage the entire Microsoft stack without having to spend time and resources supporting functionality that was never used with their legacy system.  On a feature by feature basis, SharePoint 2010 (along with 3^rd party tools like Colligo) can now match OpenText and Autonomy.  Conversely, OpenText and Autonomy cannot match the much broader benefits that SharePoint offers (along with the native integration across the Microsoft stack) and given the billions that Microsoft invests in R&D, it is doubtful they will catch up. 

If a legal firm wants to move to SharePoint as a DMS because they are tired of paying expensive licensing, maintenance, and consulting fees to feature rich, bespoke legal DMS vendors and want to leverage the cost savings available with more main stream platforms (i.e. SharePoint), then they will need to be somewhat flexible on the feature set. Clifford Chance took the middle road where they built out/bought what they needed, but ignored the rest.  This is an excellent strategy and one that really resonated with the audience at the presentation.

As an aside, the conference was in Nashville, which was my first visit to the city and a very enjoyable experience.  Like a lot of fellow road warriors, I have travelled in and out of many cities without ever stopping to explore.  On this trip, we were able to visit (with partners and customers) a few fine restaurants and sample the live music on Broadway and 2^nd.  Nashville is a fun city with a great live music culture and many interesting and historic sites.  It was a welcome change from the usual Atlanta/Orlando/Las Vegas circuit, where conferences always seem to end up these days.

AvePoint was ranked #427 (see page 198), Satory Global was #233, and NextDocs came in at #67.

It is great to see our SharePoint partners and friends getting recognized for their tremendous growth and success. Congratulations on a job well done.

Johnny Chloride, Technology Solutions Manager, HASSELL

It was great to read the article in Image and Data Manager Magazine featuring one of our customers, HASSELL, a well known international design firm with 13 studios in Australia, China, South East Asia and the United Kingdom. The article details HASSELL’s experience in creating a major Enterprise Content Management system using SharePoint and Colligo.

The article really captures the fact that HASSELL is pushing the technology envelope to engage their geographically dispersed designers and architects and to maximize their ability to collaborate and be creative.  The ECM challenge for design and architectural firms is to create an easy to use collaborative solution that can also provide the formal email & records management functionality required for their industry. Their environment is very complex with over 150 different software applications in the ecosystem, with heavy metadata usage and the need to work with many external parties.  SharePoint, with help from third-parties such as Colligo, is well suited to address these requirements and we are very pleased to be part of this successful deployment at HASSELL. 

A big thanks to Johnny Chloride, the Technology Solutions Manager at HASSELL for his participation and IDM for publishing the article.