I got notified by the RMMA New Zealand branch that they were presented an awesome slidedeck from Mark Orange. It covers the New Zealand Public Records Act, the Records Center capabilities and integration with Exchange and Outlook with SharePoint.
Mark highlights some key points, of which the main is around the fact that most of the talk on Records Management is based on the American acts such as DoD 5015.2. As mentioned before, and confirmed in this slidedeck, it is due for release at the end of 2007. It lists a good set of features that I've not seen before and were not present in the press release:
| File Plan Builder Supplemental Markings Vital Review Multiple Locations Folder holds Close Folders Referencing & Linking | Metadata Propagation Cutoff Unique ID Disposition Email Expunge |
What the presentation doesn't really go into is where the gaps are in the Records Center in terms of the acts. What he does highlight is an approach to reaching these Act requirements which lead to implementing MOSS 2007 Records Center and then developing additional extra custom features to fill the gap (whatever they may be). This will be the case with other Acts, for instance the Australian Acts.
The other key points he highlights are around Document and Records Management:
- Office Integration with SharePoint - publish directly to SharePoint
- Document Property Panel (metadata)
- Information Policy Management
- Offline documents in Outlook
- Create 'Final' documents
- Document Comparison
- Document Signing
- Document Workflow (Approval etc.) within Office Client including expiration, auditing and holds
It's always good to hear how people push the product, especially in this space. He also tries to explain to the Records Managers how the File Plan paradigm fits with Document Libraries and Content Types. He does conclude by saying that it's not going to define your file plan, business process, retention and disposal policies or cultural change as with all vendor products BUT it will provide you with all the tools to do this and as I keep highlight A LOT more!
With regards to extending Records Management he also gives examples for extending the out of the box policies:
- De-duplication
- Digital signature-based document integrity
- Document "Hygience"
- Convert to Fixed Format
Slide 42 also gives a great mapping of how the components play with the actors such as Records Custodian's, Knowledge Worker's and Laywers and Paralegals.
With regards to Exchange, Mark highlights that Exchange will play a different role to what it did in the past in terms of public folders and email handling.
Also, there's some great looking "supe'd" up slides in the deck for standard SharePoint slides that I've been using.