If your organization is in a regulared industry and you have compliance policies that must be followed (especially the US). SharePoint without records mgmt disciples applied is a complaince hole. AIIM and ARMA have some great articles that cover this.

Regards,

Alain Lord
MVP SharePoint Server
SharePoint Québec User Group lead

for sure the one who wrote this comment on sharepoint, doesn’t really know it .. make him prove it and he will be definitely wrong about, if u just know how to work with sharepoint.. believe me your business problems will be solved but u didn’t even give it a try and it’s obvious ..

really this is the first time .. i read this about sharepoint.. and hope it’s the last..

shame to say this about the best product in Microsoft…

do u even know or realized how many licensed sold for this product in small time…!!! wow sure who wrote know nothing..

have u looked at SharePoint new feature about Record Management.. sure not, it’s here in SharePoint to apply to goverenance rules and you say it’s not !!!!

i suggest we contact that person and give him a try on sharepoint 2010… really … we have to do this..

With my regards;
Mai Omar
Senior Solutions Developer
Blog: http://maiomar.itegyptcorp.com
Website: http://www.itegyptcorp.com

SharePoint works well when one focuses beyond the use of SharePoint as a simple collaboration platform and focuses on using SharePoint as a records management system. In brief, we should all investigate the use of SharePoint Records Centers to store content that will become a corporate asset, move worthy content from SharePoint sites to the Records Center and then delete the site where the documents were created.

A short-term view of SharePoint leads to the ’site silo’ syndrome mentioned in the article. A long-term view is focused on consolidating valuable corporate document assets into a centralize location for ease of access and the application of aging policies.

As with other record and knowledge systems, the corporate body quickly realise the need to extend KIM governance to SharePoint content, to include training about what different site types are to be used for, and manage the archiving or records centre/management policy accordingly. Legislation kicks hard if these policies are not in place and implemented.

FA opts for SharePoint 2010 to improve communication

http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2263007/fa-opts-sharepoint

Don’t know how long that link will be under this article but I found that one way more significant than the one I was supposed to read and comment on.

Ignoring the rest of the article, the statement of “…firms were deploying SharePoint for business collaboration without any forethought about information governance around the technology.” is really the main point here. Dont blame IT for not being able to pull data out afterwards, if you remove everyone that had access as soon as a project is over without at least leaving one “Data Archive” person to be able to manage legacy information, then you’ve screwed yourself. This has nothing to do with SharePoint and everything to do with improper planning, forethought and governance.

Personally, I find the article a bit silly in how its presented. It reads as if the writer has no clue what he’s typing…just a bunch of one-liners (probably fed from his editor) that are designed to do nothing but intice debate. There’s no substance, just loaded statements, and not enough of a story to really see whats behind it. Not that I disagree with the idea of what trying to be presented, I just dont feel it does any good to present a topic like this in such a “weak” manner.

Just my opinion.

- Dessie

I’m totally with you. Just like a network drive (or any file storage/collaboration method), a SharePoint implementation, to be truly useful, has to be designed and managed (ongoing) by a human being, with thought put into both initial organization and long-term usage. The key in the article is “…without any forethought about information governance around the technology.” Well duh–of course you end up with problems later on.

And in response to, “‘Getting IT to dig out that information will not be high on their list of priorities, because staff will be working on other projects by then,’” I’d argue that all along, there should’ve been, not necessarily an IT person, but perhaps better yet, a information-management-focused person organizing the content, designing the SP interface for easy access to same, and maintaining the site. Without that, one’s SP site becomes just another disorganized network drive (only in fancier SP packaging).