SharePoint 2010 News

Microsoft released some information about SharePoint 2010 yesterday and I wanted to make sure it didn’t slip by any of you who may be interested in it. 

SharePoint 2010 development has hit a milestone.  They have reached the technical preview engineering stage.  This means they are going to allow a limited number of people access to preview what’s inside SharePoint 2010.  Clear progress. 

It’s going to be tough to get an invitation to the preview though, so the rest of us will have to wait for the SharePoint 09 Conference in October when they plan to make public all the new additions and feature upgrades in SharePoint 2010. 

In the meantime, Microsoft has made this sneak peek available on their new SharePoint 2010 landing page.  There aren’t a lot of details there and they don’t mention SharePoint Records Management specifically, but some of the videos are fairly informative.  They also have an FAQ and a guide to preparing for SharePoint 2010 that are worth looking over.

 

It’s All About the Processes

No one is more infatuated with SharePoint than I am. (Sad, I know, but true.) I think it is a fantastic tool with almost unlimited potential for solving a long list of just about any organization’s content and records management needs.

But the operative word here is ‘tool’. Someone with no construction experience can go out and buy the most expensive, sophisticated tools available, only to build a house that collapses in the first stiff breeze. (Coincidentally, this person would also be called a ‘tool’.) While an experienced, talented builder can go out and buy a cheap hammer, some nails and a few cords of wood and build a home that lasts for generations.

Like any records management solution, SharePoint alone will not solve your needs unless it is used to support clearly defined processes. Long before selecting your records management solution, it is absolutely essential that you conduct a comprehensive needs assessment and document exactly what you want your solution to do. Only then can you evaluate solutions, implement systems and validate results with any true accuracy.

I don’t typically recommend books or articles on this site. God knows, the Internet has given us access to way more reading material than we could ever want. But I recently came across a very good article discussing this same point that is well worth your time if you are thinking about implementing SharePoint or any other document and records management solution. It’s written by an electronic document management consultant named Bud Porter-Roth, of, appropriately, Porter-Roth Associates. You can find it here.

 

Office 2010 Beta Release…Anyone?…Anyone?…Bueller?

OK, for those of you keeping score, here’s the latest official scoop on Office 2010.  (Oh, and yes, ‘Office 14′ is now officially called ‘Office 2010′ according to Steve Ballmer – who should probably know.)   It will now ship in the early part of next year (hence the name). 

That should not come as a big surprise to anyone who’s been following this, but I guess I’m still a little impatient.  I had a feeling the release date would be moved into sometime next year, but I still hoped to see a beta release sometime this month.  Thing is, I haven’t heard a word.  Not even an unsubstantiated rumor.  The silence is deafening.

Anyone out there heard anything I may not know about?   Any of you folks with inside knowledge of what’s going on want to shoot me an anonymous update?  I’m dying to see what they’ve done with the SharePoint Records Management functionality, but I won’t even have a clue until the beta is released.

 

SharePoint Sprawl

Clearly, one of the great things about SharePoint is how easy it is to use.  With a minimum of training (and the proper permission set), users can build team sites, Document Libraries, folders, whatever they think they need. 

Unfortunately, one of the worst things about SharePoint is also how easy it is to use.  At least once or twice a week I hear about another organization that has implemented SharePoint and is suddenly experiencing what has come to be known as ‘SharePoint Sprawl’.  SharePoint Sprawl is what happens when SharePoint is installed at an organization before the organization puts controls in place to prevent users from randomly creating SharePoint sites and Document Libraries without considering what they will contain and how their content will be managed. 

SharePoint Sprawl is especially dangerous to Records Managers.  One day your organization will install SharePoint and you’ll go home only to come in the next day to find SharePoint sites created all over the place with documents (and potential records) scattered in almost every direction.  And all this with complete disregard for taxonomy, metadata and retention considerations. 

If your organization is planning to standup SharePoint it is incumbent on you to make yourself part of the implementation team as early as possible and insist that the organization develop a logical set of controls that prevents SharePoint Sprawl from ever happening.  One of the best things you can do is duplicate what one of my customers did.  This company had a very active and efficient Records Management team and they made sure that they were involved in every step of the SharePoint implementation.  They developed a policy that allowed almost anyone in the company to request a SharePoint site for just about any reason, but the request had to be routed through the Records Management team before the SharePoint Administrator would actually create the site.  The Records Management team checked every site request to ensure that documents were in the right locations, had the proper metadata and, if the site produced records, rules were in place to get those records properly declared and classified into the Records Center.  (In a touch of irony, the company created a very good SharePoint workflow that automated the entire SharePoint site request process.)

Again, if your organization is considering a SharePoint implementation, I encourage you to do what you can to prevent SharePoint sprawl at the earliest possible stage.

 

MIKE 2.0 – The Sequel

I want to move away for just a second from discussing pure SharePoint records management issues and talk a little about something I’ve become really excited about lately – namely, MIKE 2.0. 

 MIKE 2.0 is an information management delivery methodology developed by BearingPoint and made publically available as open source.  (You can find it here.)  Whole books can be written about MIKE 2.0, so I won’t go into a ton of details here.  But, for what it’s worth, I think MIKE 2.0 is the best delivery methodology I’ve ever seen for developing your records management (or Enterprise Content Management) solution. 

MIKE 2.0 has a lot of excellent components which can all be utilized to help your organization create a successful records management implementation, but there are two things in particular about MIKE 2.0 that really appeal to me.  The first is its focus on pre-implementation analysis.   Nothing you do to create a successful SharePoint records management implementation will be more important than the analysis you do prior to creating your first SharePoint site.  MIKE 2.0 understands this and provides some terrific tools and guidance for managing the ‘Business Assessment’ and ‘Technology Assessment’ phases of the project. 

The other aspect of MIKE 2.0 that I find so compelling is the iterative nature of the implementation phases of the project.  Having worked on a number of records management implementations that used the old ‘waterfall’ delivery methods, I can tell you without hesitation that an iterative approach is a much more effective and generally successful approach to rolling out a records management solution. 

If you are at the early stages of your records management implementation and have some influence on how the project will be managed, I encourage you to consider MIKE 2.0 as your delivery methodology.