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I am giving a presentation next month to a group of executives who asked, "How do we get started with SharePoint for ECM and RM? They get that SharePoint is winning if it hasn't already won. Whether this is fair or right or wrong is immaterial. SharePoint unifies much of the infrastructure for content and records in many organizations. It is less clear how SharePoint relates to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Records Management (RM). Their question is: where do we start to address these issues?

Here is my response:

The first step in any journey is to define where you are going, because otherwise (as Alice said), any road will get you there. A roadmap is the set of tasks and steps that need to be addressed. Typically, this includes multiple projects related to SharePoint's impact on people, processes, and technologies in the organization. A SharePoint ECM and RM roadmap, including SharePoint 2010, is particularly important because there are so many new components.  The definition of a SharePoint ECM and RM partner and product ecosystem is another important step because there are so many SharePoint partners that have made important, but overlapping contributions to SharePoint 2010 to support ECM and RM within an enterprise. These include product companies like KnowledgeLake, Nintex, AvePoint, Quest, traditional ECM providers such as EMC, Open Text and IBM, as well as professional services providers. Next week, in a follow-up post, I will outline how to evaluate the SharePoint partner ecosystem in the context of SharePoint ECM and RM. This week, I will focus on the non-ecosystem decisions and work to be done.

Content Types are Critical
Content Types are the foundation for RM within SharePoint. When properly defined, Content Types allow organizations to define the retention and records management rules for each type of content and enable the consistent enforcement of retention policies. Standard definitions of Content Types are maintained in the SharePoint Content Type Hub based on managed metadata from the SharePoint Term Store. This is powerful. We have seen the Content Type model work in companies with tens of thousands of sites, and we believe it is a foundation capability that enables the achievement of records management in large organizations.  It takes a lot of up front planning, and is easiest to achieve at a version changeover of SharePoint (e.g. 2007 to 2010), but it works at the scale of a global company.

One of the criticisms of using SharePoint 2010 for records management that we have heard recently is that many elements need to come together to implement a large file plan and retention schedule across hundreds of Content Types and thousands of SharePoint sites. This is true today, but we have found that the application of best practices can minimize the complexity and arduousness of this task.

Organizations need to standardize their Content Type definitions and rules for routing and inheritance in order to scale them to the enterprise.

Define an Enterprise Information Lifecycle
SharePoint supports the definition of an information lifecycle. A lifecycle defines the states that content goes through and the rules that are enforced in the transition between states. A standard lifecycle enables consistent treatment of content retention and disposition decisions from the creation through destruction of a piece of content. It is straightforward to enforce lifecycles within SharePoint. Part of the implementation is included in best practices to define the lifecycle states, and part of the implementation is enforced within the definition of rules within each content type. A lifecycle is fundamentally separate from business process management, or workflow, and can be enforced across multiple repositories. Our experience is that a Draft, Work-in-Process, and Final lifecycle state model works well to enable SharePoint RM.

SharePoint Skills are a Major Issue
SharePoint skills are not exactly like ECM Skills. SharePoint implementation requires much more systems integration experience on the team than the implementation of the traditional ECM tools, such as Documentum, FileNet or Open Text. These vendors have spent years (decades) enabling the implementation of their products to be configuration tasks that require less systems integration than they did in the 1990s. We have found that the skills associated with the implementation of traditional ECM tools, particularly records management skills, are essential to a SharePoint RM project and that teams that lack these skills stumble as they try to learn about records management and implement it at the same time in SharePoint.

Site Provisioning is the Time to Implement Records Management within Sites
One of the most challenging elements we have seen in justifying the deployment of SharePoint 2010 for ECM and RM is that enterprise records management in SharePoint requires many elements to have been defined in advance to be consistently enabled and enforced across all sites. Furthermore, these capabilities are only useful if they can be easily integrated into the SharePoint sites that as they are widely and rapidly deployed in an organization. This requires that a site provisioning process is carefully governed and that the standards for site provisioning, including site administration, metadata management, and navigation are defined in advance. SharePoint RM is much more difficult and expensive to impose on sites after they have been put into production than when they are created. The best time to impose these standards is at the migration to a new version of SharePoint and the time to plan for this is now if you haven't migrated to SharePoint 2010 already.

Build your Business Case Now!
SharePoint is challenging to implement for ECM and RM. SharePoint may be free to an RM project because SharePoint ECM and RM capabilities are contained in the SharePoint Standard Client Access License (CAL) that have been acquired for the enterprise, but this can create the wrong cost expectation. SharePoint add-on components are expensive and SharePoint customization can also be expensive. A Business Case is critical to justify this investment and a Roadmap is important to defining how these capabilities will be implemented in a way that adds more value than they cost.

SharePoint 2010 will enable records management to finally happen for electronic content in many enterprises, because it is tightly integrated with Microsoft Office and because it reflects how users like to interact with their content.  We believe that, with careful planning and the implementation of best practices for SharePoint 2010 RM, the SharePoint Record Center will enable compliance and provide a trusted source of information for records management purposes.