RM—the changing role of technology

Records management (RM) has many pain points-the volume and diversity of information, complex regulations and concerns about risk, to name a few. Management of e-mail is one place that all those pain points converge into a particularly challenging scenario. Even the legal department at Microsoft is not immune. "My first day on the job I had 300 e-mails," says Anne Kelley, associate general counsel in Microsoft's Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) group. "We are an e-mail culture, and in our department, many of those e-mail messages are records."

LCA is also highly sensitive about issues such as confidentiality, attorney/client privilege and document security. "We wanted to use SharePoint for managing our e-mails because it is a collaborative environment and can also provide the level of security we were seeking. However, the lawyers in our department were most comfortable working in their familiar Outlook environment," Kelley explains.

Works hand in hand
One of Kelley's colleagues recommended Contributor Pro, a software product from Colligo that allows e-mails to be put into SharePoint by dragging and dropping them into a set of Outlook folders that are for records management. "This was a great breakthrough moment for us," she says. "The product was a real change agent and has had a tremendous impact."

Each SharePoint site used by LCA has a content type or classification scheme that accommodates the e-mails (and any associated attachments) delivered from Colligo. Behind the scenes is a records center in SharePoint. "That is where the policies are programmed and where the long-term retention takes place," Kelley says. "So we have a business process at the front end and compliance at the back end, with collaboration in between."

The taxonomy on which the classification scheme is based also supports security measures. "A team of three people maintains the taxonomy," says Nishan deSilva, director of information management and compliance at Microsoft, "and the taxonomy maps to security so that documents are appropriately protected if they are confidential, or if access should be limited to a subset of individuals. Taxonomy, security and retention work hand in hand."

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Source: kmworld.com
By: Judith Lamont