Hi again to everyone from SharePoint Saturday NY! It was a great chance to get out with the SharePoint user community. Great content – and flawless weather! Midsummer in New York and I didn’t miss the beach once. Ok, once.
Managed Metadata and Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010 remain a very popular topic, and I had great participation during my session. (Presentation on SlideShare.)
Due to another speaker’s family emergency (unfortunately) I was asked to take over a previously announced presentation on Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Web Content Management (WCM) and Migration Strategies. So I didn’t’ have as much time as I’d like to prepare -- but I did put together the ultimate SharePoint 2010 ECM “cheat sheet”. Here goes. (Presentation on SlideShare.)
First, there’s a rich range of ECM features in SharePoint 2010. Here’s a quick road map in order of increasing complexity and organizational maturity. (Also, although some folks consider InfoPath and forms management to be an ECM feature, I’ve left it out for brevity.)
One general rule before we move through all of these – SharePoint 2010 now supports auto-generated document IDs. When a document is first uploaded to SharePoint, the server assigns a unique identifier that follows the document throughout its lifecycle – even as it moves from site to site as part of workflows, organizer roles, or lifecycle management policies.
ECM Configuration Roadmap
|
Function |
Feature Scope |
Where to configure it |
|
Content Organizer |
Site |
Site Settings | Content Organizer Rules |
|
Hold and eDiscovery |
Site |
Site Settings | Hold and eDiscovery Section |
|
In place Records Management |
Site Collection |
Context Menu | Compliance Details |
|
Send to Records Center |
Define in Central Admin |
Central Admin: General Settings | Send To Connections |
|
ILM |
Variable |
Content Type definition; or override at library/folder level in library settings – Information Management Policy Settings |
Versioning and Metadata
Document versioning remains one of the oldest and strongest functions in SharePoint. As users collaborate on a document, you can:
· Require the document be checked out to a user before edits
· Save a running copy of all draft and final published versions
· Require administrative approval before other users can see approved, published content
· Retain or delete prior drafts or published versions
In addition, you can – and should - use “Content Types” to establish sets of properties about a document – e.g. Draft/final, presentation date, subject keywords, etc. These types and properties will greatly help in using all the other features that let you manage content after it’s created and/or published.
Drop off library and Content organizer rules
In large, complex sites, users who occasionally write new content are faced with a dilemma – where should I post this? They often pick one of two options:
· Post it nowhere for fear of “breaking” something
· Post it to multiple places – one of them is bound to be right.
The good news in SharePoint 2010 – users don’t need to remember all the “right” places to post a document. Instead, by activating the Content Organizer, you can direct users to a single “drop-off library”, and then use rules to route the document to the correct location. Rules are flexible, and can be driven by content types, document properties, titles, etc. I’ve listed an example below for a rule to route audio files to a media library if they are copyrighted in 1997:
Finally, Content Organizer functions have to be activated as site features.
eDiscovery and Hold
Hold and eDiscovery allow an administrator or compliance staff to “freeze” a document it place, or route it to a holding area. Holds can be implemented directly on a document. You can also preview a set of search rules, and let the system add documents to a “hold” automatically (it saves an Excel report when done!)
This function can help outside of litigation support – we have clients who use this when they need to find and purge documents from cancelled deals – the documents are moved to a pending area and then deleted.
Records Management
Records management was included in SharePoint 2007, but the functions were so limited that they seldom saw enterprise use. Essentially, you could copy content types to a new site collection and manage them as records there. However, the original documents were left intact, and could be edited further. SharePoint 2010 presumes you will do one of two things (most likely):
· Ship the document to a Record Center site collection and leave behind a link.
· Declare the documents to be a record “in place” and manage it there.
Here’s another question – why? Simple. Once you’ve declared a document to be a record, you can more easily prevent the document form being deleted interactively, or exempt the record from other document retention policies.
Send to Records Center
Record Center is a custom, in the box site template that you can add to an existing SharePoint 2010 farm. Once you’ve established it, you can define a custom “Send To” action for the document context menu (the hove). These settings can be found in Central Administration | General Settings. You can pick a target location, and decide whether documents can be copied, moved, or moved with a link left behind.
Records In Place:
You can also let users declare records interactively through the context menu for Compliance Details. (This can also be a great use of a Ribbon-based Custom Action if you want to customize the UI).
As documents age, you can define a lot of things to happen automatically via Information Lifecycle Policies. Historically you could only define these on a per content type basis – but now you can also define this at a library or folder level. These settings are reached from the Ribbon for Library Settings.
Polices can be applied uniformly to all content, or can be excluded for files already flagged as a “Record”. You can define stages and test for properties – usually based on document creation, modification or approval dates.
Most importantly, what can you do to these documents? A lot:
ILM Actions
· Move to Recycle Bin
· Permanently Delete
· Transfer to another site or Records Center
· Start Workflow
· Skip to Next Stage
· Declare Record
· Delete prior drafts
· Delete Prior versions
Finally – don’t forget to generate a File Plan Report – it rolls up a summary of all the retention policies that govern a given library:
Good luck – there’s a lot to learn for ECM in SharePoint 2010!