Blogs

I recently posted about the Public Beta of SharePoint 2013, noting that some of the features had not been publically described, so they were still under NDA.  A couple of days later, Don Lueders, of the very important SharePointRecordsManagement blog posted an interview with Adam Harmetz, the Lead Program Manager for the Microsoft SharePoint Document and Records Management Engineering Team that shed much light on many of the questions that anyone who follows the progress of SharePoint as a platform for content governance and records management would want to understand.  You must read the whole interview, but here are the records management highlights: 

Microsoft Supports Records Centers in the Office 365 with some caveats 

Microsoft does not recommend hosting virtualized Records Centers in the cloud.  “There might be some situations where hosting something in Azure is the best option (it’s definitely possible), but I’d recommend examining the other options first.”

Microsoft does not support “send to” from Office 365 sites to On Premise SharePoint Records Centers.  “For now, though, you won’t be able to archive an item from a collaborative site in Office 365 to an on premises Records Center.”

Introduces EDiscovery Sites – The following Microsoft description is self-explanatory

“It’s my pleasure to announce to your readers the eDiscovery Center, a central place for lawyers to identify, preserve, filter, and analyze content across SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, and file share content.”

“Central place to find and manage all types of content: SharePoint documents, wikis, microblogs, discussions, list items; Exchange mails, tasks, calendar items; Lync conversations”

“Our eDiscovery system uses the in place search systems – SharePoint Search and Exchange Search (both powered by a new search core based upon FAST) to give real time results.”

 “By having one UI and workflow for managing all those types of content, we expect to be able to save legal teams a LOT of time and headaches.”

“In SharePoint and Exchange 2010, we took a bet on an “in place” records management strategy. We are building off that thinking in eDiscovery as well.”

 “All of the data managed by the eDiscovery Center can be exported into the industry standard EDRM XML format.”

Introduces SharePoint and Email Integration – The following Microsoft description is self-explanatory

“I think you can tell from my previous response that coordination between Exchange, SharePoint and Lync will be a theme for the 2013 release.”

“To that end, the Exchange and SharePoint teams have been working on an app you can add to your Team Sites called Site Mailboxes – you can read all about it in this recent Site Mailboxes blog poston the Exchange Team Blog.”

“In short, it provides a place for teams to manage both the documents and the emails around a project together. For users, a site mailbox serves as a central filing cabinet, providing a place to file project emails and documents that can be only accessed and edited by site members.”

“Mail can be filed into this site mailbox and viewed in both Outlook 2013 and the SharePoint team site. Conversely, SharePoint document libraries for the project can be viewed in Outlook 2013 and you can just drag and drop content into the doclib, right within Outlook.”

Summary

Microsoft continues to strengthen SharePoint 2013 in ways that many, many organizations have been asking for.  There is some overlap with some of these capabilities from current SharePoint ecosystem providers.  The evolution of the SharePoint ecosystem is a topic that I will return to after the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas in November.  Thanks to Don Lueders for surfacing this information.