Check out 8 Reasons You Need a Strategy for Managing Information -- Before It's Too Late or our new e-book 8 secrets of an effective content or records implementation. FREE.

Our next e-book will be on SharePoint -- here's what we have so far.  Want to participate?  Give me your advice, concerns, best practices, worries and watch-lists re SharePoint.  No product pitches. Contact me HERE.  Target publication date = about December 14.

• 8 things you need to know about SharePoint governance 
• 8 things SharePoint 2010 needs to be a true ECM system  
• 8 things to consider when implementing SharePoint with another ECM engine
• 8 ways to use SharePoint for social computing 
• 8 more things you need to know about SharePoint 

Here's the total list we've published so far.  Thanks to all of the authors and readers who have helped with this rather fun project.

He is responsible for the overall direction and leadership of ECM migration opportunities and is often involved in discovery sessions, planning outlines, content analysis and staff management.

8 Steps to an Effective ECM Archive Migration

With the vast number of disparate systems in an organization, along with their relative complexity and enormous amounts of data, ECM migrations can be daunting, to say the least. This brief list of eight considerations in undertaking an ECM Migration is meant to provide a common-sense approach to addressing the process.

1 -- Business justification and ROI.

A critical consideration in any ECM migration project is a clearly established ROI and approach to measurement. Without these elements, getting funding will be a challenge. The first step is to build out a simple executive summary focusing on what’s in it for the various groups involved along with reasons for initiating the project in the first place, and the anticipated outcome. Focus on a specific dollar figure for those concentrating on the bottom line – whether it’s savings in storage or bandwidth, maintenance costs for ECM, or staffing costs. Consider making an initial decision on whether to federate, migrate, or do nothing.

2 -- Take time to improve your business.

Take just one moment to understand what additional capabilities may be realized by the migration. New solutions will often include new capabilities, and while they may not be on your list of requirements, they could be capabilities worth implementing. However, any project should be focused on improving ease of use and increasing productivity. By switching to a new and improved ECM system we can realize additional benefits in these areas. Reducing document storage costs, re-indexing for additional organization or enhancing ePresentment are all good examples. And since we don’t need to turn everything on from day one, keep an eye on the ball and what the business really needs.

3 -- Expertise counts.

No matter what a particular vendor says, ECM migrations can be complicated, but they are also well worth the investment when done right. One of the keys to success is expertise. Having individuals on the project team with the proper background and a solid understanding of both traditional and new approaches can significantly increase your chances of success. Since it's a skill set that may not exist internally, you need to weigh the pro’s and con’s of allocating funds for training staff. More often than not however, working with a 3rd party vendor or hiring to get the expertise required will do the trick.

4 -- It's about Experience.

Training and skills can only take you so far. When it comes to ECM migration, you need individuals with experience. Having project members who have been through past migrations can prove invaluable to the overall project and its success. Again, if the experience does not exist in-house, it’s worth investigating a new hire or working with a vendor well versed in such projects.

5 -- It's about Methodology.

The actual migration – moving of the data – is the easy part. In most cases, a migration can take a number of days. To get the organization to this stage, you need to have a good plan and more importantly, a methodology. Teams require a vision as to how this project can be accomplished. So don’t just “wing it” – adopt a formal methodology around the practice and follow through. Don’t have time to investigate? Use this simple acronym as a starting point: DETAIL (Discovery, Extract, Transform, Audit, Index and Load).

6 -- It's ALL about the technology.

Map out all the moving pieces. If you are looking to automate, how many files will be moved and over how long? What formats are you moving from and going to? What about platforms? Mainframe to distributed, Unix, Linux, Windows? Are you running each step manually, or building/buying various toolkits and components to get the job done? Don’t overcomplicate things, just build the lists and organize them appropriately. When you need an answer it will be readily available. Understanding the technology taxonomy will prove to be a critical exercise, and should not be overlooked.  

7 -- Define your approach.

ECM migrations don’t happen in minutes, but they don’t take years either. If you’re dealing with terabytes upon terabytes of data, it will take time to move over this content. So ask the question: how is it best delivered in a timely and cost effective manner? Onsite, offsite, remotely or SaaS? Choose the best option for the business but keep in mind the potential timeline for the actual transferring of the content itself.

8 -- Keep it simple.

This old adage is still very valid. Just because a project can be huge, it doesn't have to be difficult. Break down actionable items into simple project plans with dates and ownership. Outsourcing to an experienced vendor can often alleviate much of the day-to-day tasks and make things simpler, at least for you!

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Don't forget to download our new free e-book -- 8 secrets of an effective content or records implementation.

Check these out as well...

1. 8 things you need to know about content classification and ECM  
2. 8 ways to increase user adoption in an ECM project  
3. 8 things to look for in a document management service provider 
4. 8 ways to reduce your storage and bandwidth costs for document imaging solutions  
5. 8 things to consider when looking for ECM consultants  
6. 8 Steps to Avoid Process and Organizational Problems when Implementing an ECM System
   
7. 8 things to remember when managing ECM applications
8. 8 things that always worried you about legacy content, but were afraid to ask about 

Since 1984, Risetime has been serving the needs of organizations looking for a strong partner to provide business and technology solutions and services. Headquartered in Chicago and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Risetime focuses on a wide range of IT consulting services as well as business process management, content management, and web solutions.

[A note:  You might be interested in these 2 AIIM courses Evaluating SharePoint for Enterprise Deployment and Evaluating SharePoint.  A further note:  This post is a bit more product specific than we usually get in this column, but I found Joe's use of specific products to extend SharePoint functionality to be creative and interesting.]

You probably are aware that SharePoint is a great fit for most organizations document management and collaboration needs. What about social computing?  SharePoint gives you a good starting point. What do you do when SharePoint falls short? Here are 8 ways companies can extend SharePoint’s out-of-the-box capabilities to better fit their social computing vision.

8 Ways to Use SharePoint for Social Computing

1 -- SharePoint My Sites

SharePoint's My Sites functionality encourages interaction among employees and offers a very basic, but corporate equivalent to a Facebook profile. My Sites let employees learn about each other’s interests and expertise. However, My Site can also be pretty underwhelming and stale for the avid Facebook user. To make it a viable social computing tool, organizations should consider extending them past their out-of-the-box limitations. Consider installing third party products like nGage by OI Software. nGage gives My Sites a real WOW factor such as a visual “reputation," scoring user contribution using criteria such as their openness, creativity and contribution level. 

2 -- SharePoint Team Sites

Team Sites provide a centralized collaboration tool to manage teams and projects and include tools such as document libraries, lists, group calendars, tasks, contacts, and announcements. It is possible to extend this functionality with products like Kiiro collaboration software.  This extends the basic SharePoint team site to allow Twitter-like status notes by team members giving instant updates as well as an impressive “Who’s on What” type of dashboard.

3 -- SharePoint Blogs

Blogs can be a top source for up to date expertise from subject matter experts. User generated content often provides in-depth knowledge garnered from individual interests and subject matter experts. Harnessing this knowledge within the organization can provide a wealth from untapped resources. Within SharePoint, every My Site includes a blog. Individual blogs, as well as blogs associated with Team Sites can be archived and indexed for searching, becoming a resource for collective organizational knowledge. 

As internal blogs become more successful you’ll quickly outgrow SharePoint’s standard functionality. With a little technical help during implementation, leverage Community Kit 2.0 available for free on CodePlex. Extend SharePoint’s basic blog with Tag Clouds, friendly URLs, multiple categories for postings, and even comment spam detection if you want to implement this on your public facing website. 

4 -- SharePoint People Search

Another key desire for many organizations is to easily locate users within the organization by searching their profiles for specific keywords.  NewsGator can extend search past the keywords and find experts your coworkers have scored as the most knowledgeable. Extend SharePoint’s people search to display these traits in the results, enhancing SharePoint with a very efficient way to track down the top experts for any challenge. 

5 -- SharePoint Wikis

Wikis created within SharePoint are an excellent alternative to share knowledge, allowing others to edit and contribute through a simple interface. SharePoint wikis incorporate all of the features of SharePoint to secure and control the content: permissions, version history, document check-out and in, and approval workflows. Again, we recommend the Community Kit for SharePoint. Add custom page templates, tools for importing content from other wikis, and a web part that shows pages ranked by hits/popularity. It’s easy and free.

6 -- SharePoint Community Sites

SharePoint gives you the ability to create community sites b and invite or give access to users. SharePoint security groups control access to the content in the community. Blogs, discussion groups, and Wikis can easily be added and monitored using basic SharePoint functionality. NewsGator offers a powerful tool to quickly create and facilitate community sites around new ideas and innovation inside a company’s SharePoint Portal. Encourage quick and lightweight conversation with features like MicroBlogs. Automatically populate community sites with content related to their community site topics. NewsGator is also already boasting how they extend SharePoint 2010 features and seem well ahead of the pack on the R&D side with their product development team. 

7 -- SharePoint Announcements of New Employees

If a SharePoint Portal is in place, adding new employees and posting an announcement to your landing page is quick and easy. Asking everyone to fully complete their My Site profile on their first day also allows information to be instantly available to co-workers and more fully integrate them into the organization right away.

Add key data to new employee announcements using products like AASoftech’s OrgChart Webpart . Integrating directly with SharePoint, this web part adds a great resource for an HR department to add further detail to a new employee announcement. Instantly update your company’s org chart and announce how they fit in by just adding the new employees to Active Directory.

8 -- SharePoint Social Computing Outside Your Network 

SharePoint Groups are an efficient way to control user access to all your SharePoint content. As security models go, SharePoint is a pretty effective security structure for controlling how your Social Media features are viewed and used inside your network.  But what if you want to involve your customers, partners or vendors?

Trying to design and maintain an efficient security strategy can be overwhelming when planning for a large quantity of external users and groups. If you’re looking to extend your social computing strategy to include customers, partners and vendors, Awareness Social Media Marketing Software offers you tools for handling security as well as extending your strategy to include users outside your organization. 

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Some other posts that may be of interest...

• 8 things you need to know about SharePoint governance 
• 8 things SharePoint 2010 needs to be a true ECM system  
• 8 more things you need to know about SharePoint 
• 8 things to consider when implementing SharePoint with another ECM engine 

Have you downloaded out 2 e-books yet -- check out our 8 things compilations.

BearingPoint is an independent management and technology consultancy. Owned and operated by its Partners throughout Europe, BearingPoint is offering its clients the best possible value in terms of tangible, measurable results by leveraging business and technology expertise. The company currently employs 3.250 people in 14 European countries and is serving commercial, financial and public services clients. 

Did you know that AIIM has a comprehensive e-mail training program?  Check it out.

8 Things to Remember When Implementing an E-Mail Policy

1 -- Have a policy in place. 

A necessary step in professionalizing your email management is to develop and to publish an email policy. 

But what is a policy? A policy is a written proclamation from the top management or authorized board like the Corporate Compliance Office. It is an outline of general requirements, principles or rules for the use of the medium email. 

Why is it necessary to an email policy? Because email is not an option in today´s business! In 2008 BearingPoint conducted a survey about email management. More than 90% of all participants claimed email as important or very important for internal and external communication. About two thirds of the respondents indicate that more than 25% of their emails contain business-critical information and one third indicates that emails contain more than 50% business critical information. 

But in more than 50% of companies the user is the one who decides about deleting or archiving an email. Less than 50% of companies have a policy in place. To ensure legal compliance and to protect both the company and the users from misuse of the email system, you need to establish a policy framework for developing, enforcing and monitoring an email policy. 

2 -- Define ownership and involve the stakeholders. 

Remember that an email policy affects your organization and all of your employees. Make sure that at least the Legal/Compliance department, IT department, HR and the Board of Directors are involved in developing the policy in order to reflect all viewpoints in the organization. And if you are located in Europe, don’t forget to involve your workers’ council. To ensure a mature and effective policy, it’s absolutely necessary to define who is responsible for developing, monitoring and updating the policy. Typically the Corporate Compliance Office is the owner of this policy. 

3 -- Define the objectives and usage. 

First of all your policy should use clear and simple wording to be effective. Use bullet points to define the objectives of the policy and the proper use of email so that employese can easily find rules in case they are unsure. 

Define the purpose of the policy.  Some typical purposes... 

• To ensure the proper use of the company’s email system 
• To guide all users that create, use, and manage email as part of the daily business 
• To make users aware of what your company deems acceptable and unacceptable use of its email system. 

The policy additionally defines the usage of your email system:  

• Who is allowed to use the system (allowable users).  Is it only internal staff or external partners working for the company, too?
• Permitted uses - is the use of email allowed for business purposes only? If private use of email is occasionally allowed, remember to do some investigation into already existing company policies and ensure that your email policy is compatible with these existing policies. 
• Restrictions for using the email system.

4 -- Do not forget retention and disposition. 

Your policy should cover the aspects of retention and disposition. Emails and attachments should be classified and archived according to a retention schedule. A retention schedule describes all document types that need to be archived and is ordered by the defined retention periods per document type and for a global acting company at least by country. Keep this schedule clear and easy to use. Retention is one side of the medal; the other is disposition. This section of the policy should state that emails need to be disposed at the end of the lifecycle. 

5 -- Remember eDiscovery issues. 

Of course disposition is not allowed when your company is under legal hold during a litigation. When developing a policy for email archiving make sure to include a section dealing with eDiscovery issues! The section should describe what happens when your company is hit by litigation or by subpoena. It should state the mandatory process of litigation hold and all responsible contacts. 

6 -- Train your employees. 

Parallel to publishing your email policy via internal communication mechanisms like newsletters or intranet sites, you should train and verify the awareness of the policy with your employees. Training and verification are important success factors for your policy. The objective is to get users aware on how to work and how to comply with the new policy and procedures. According to BearingPoint’s survey, over 50% of the respondents use newsletters to verify that their employees are aware of a policy. 25% use learning mechanisms.  Make sure to monitor for compliance with the policy. 

7 -- Monitor enforcement. 

Be sure that the policy is used and accepted. Collect feedback about it. If required, refresh the training.

8 -- Develop a policy management framework. 

Put things together: stakeholder, usage, legal issues, retention, archiving, security, enforcement, training and monitor. Follow the lifecycle of information for your policy management: policy development, training and auditing.

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Some other posts worth checking out re: email and inbox management:

A note:  We also do really good training for organizations on best practices related to E2.0 technologies and Government 2.0 technologies.

We've also spruced up the first e-book -- 8 Reasons You Need a Strategy for Managing Information -- Before It's Too Late -- and made it way prettier and easier to read.  If you already have a copy, it might be worth it to download again.

Check them out.  Help us spread the word.

“Heroism is latent in every human soul - However humble or unknown, they (the veterans) have renounced what are accounted pleasures and cheerfully undertaken all the self-denials - privations, toils, dangers, sufferings, sicknesses, mutilations, life"  (Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain)

Brett Tarr, General Counsel with eMag Solutions, is an attorney with broad experience in litigation and electronic discovery, having spent several years at a prestigious national law firm.  Additionally, he has served as Head of Marketing and Operations for several mid-sized corporations, building both traditional and Internet-based marketing campaigns.  Brett holds a Law Degree in litigation and intellectual property as well as an MBA in Marketing and Management.

All too often, businesses discover the need for a document retention policy either when it is least convenient to implement or too late in the game.  Particularly in today’s litigious environment where virtually any form of information (paper, electronic, or audio) can be used in litigation, being proactive in this regard can save an organization from headaches and excessive costs.  An organizational retention policy provides for the systematic review, retention and destruction of information and records received or created in the course of business.   Below are 8 items to consider when developing your company’s retention policy.

8 Things to Consider when Developing an Information Retention Policy

1 -- Understand the need for a formalized retention policy.  

Having a retention policy in place is about more than just making space and keeping clutter-free; it can be a great asset should litigation arise.  The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) state that parties are to discuss preservation at the “meet and confer," but in practice, preservation decisions should be made long before.  Proactive policies establish that good faith efforts have been made by your business and help facilitate the entire litigation process 

2 -- Do you know what is “Reasonably Accessible” under the updated Federal Rules?  

FRCP 26(b)(2) delineates the standard for discovery of electronically stored information based on the concept of “Reasonably Accessible," with a two-pronged test for “Undue burden” or “Undue cost." Developing a good retention policy puts your company in control of which elements of information are available and discoverable under the new Federal Rules.

3 -- Identify which types of records should be reflected in your retention policy.  

Just saying “save it all” won’t work; you need to specify.  Successful retention policies will target the following types of information and records: Employment, Account and Corporate Tax Records, Legal Records, Electronically stored information (computer disks, hard drives, emails, web content, audio files/voicemail, information on thumb-drives/PDA’s/digital devices).  You will also need to take into account if your organization’s line of business and any specialty information that may be unique to this sector.

4 -- Make sure to ask yourself all the key questions.

• Does your retention policy reflect obligations imposed by all local, state and federal regulations?
• Has your company previously had to produce information for litigation discovery? 
• Does your company have adequate means for ensuring that information is not improperly destroyed?
• Is there adequate guidance for what information must be preserved?
• Have you accounted for replication and storage of paper documents? 
• Have you properly addressed email policies?

5 -- A company’s retention policy is only as effective as its implementation.  

It must receive buy-in starting at the top level of management and then be filtered down throughout the organization.  Policies should be easy to follow and should include periodic audits.  Your organization should renew these policies every few years, to allow for adjustments in company operations and changes in technology.  It is also important that your policy is flexible, including allowances for suspension of the policy when a litigation hold is in place.

6.  Regular enforcement is key.  

Retention policies must be regularly enforced even when no litigation or investigation is looming.  Sporadic enforcement may be viewed as strategic bad faith destruction, rather than information management occurring in the ordinary course of business.  This may result in organizational liability.  You should perform regular, scheduled checks to ensure that employee practices of destruction and retention consistently conform to the plan.  One employee’s carelessness can open up the entire organization’s information for discovery.

7 -- A properly executed retention policy can serve as a roadmap.  

It will be a helpful tool to prepare for litigation, providing both in-house and outside counsel with a roadmap for finding information in case of internal investigations, disaster recovery, regulatory requests, or litigation. If your company is to develop a functional retention policy, then it must know where all of its information is kept and how that information is stored, including names of custodians and types of servers and backup tapes used.

8.  Take stock of your backup tapes, i.e. practice Intelligent Asset Management (IAM).  

You need to determine what tapes are necessary for continued archiving.  If your company has created a compliant records retention policy, then generally there would be no need to keep tapes that fall outside of the retention requirements.  In some cases, you may have to adjust retention policies to avoid archiving tapes that are not needed and serve no useful purpose.  Identify and preserve backup tapes that are consistent with current preservation requirements and litigation holds.  Your retention policies should explicitly spell out how backup tapes are handled.  Interrogate and adopt the management of your tape media catalogs – manage your tapes and know where they all reside. 

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The policy your company creates should identify those records that need to be maintained and contain guidelines for how long certain information should be kept and how they should be destroyed.  By following these 8 steps, one can work to ensure that nothing gets left in the cold.

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Have you downloaded our free e-book yet?  Get your copy of 8 reasons you need a strategy for managing information now.  Our maybe an audiobook version for listening in the car or on the treadmill?  Click HERE.

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These posts may also be of interest:

Since joining Vamosa in 2001, Nic has helped transform the company into a sector-defining software and solutions company specializing in the emerging area of Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG). Nic has led the expansion of Vamosa in the US, while continuing to work closely with the UK team on Vamosa's strategy and vision for the recently launched suite of products.

8 things that always worried you about legacy content, but you were afraid to ask about

1 -- Your content is probably not in the best shape.  

One of the reasons why you are implementing your new ECM system is that you want your content to be better managed than it has been up until now! You will need some "tough love!" – you have to lay down the law.  "Governance" is the watchword and it calls for the 4 Cs of content governance –content needs to be clean, it needs to be classified, it needs to be correct and it needs to be credible.

2 -- You probably have a lot more content than you need. 

Most legacy content stores are littered with duplicate content; with content that is no longer relevant to your business or contributing to the cause.  But how do you work out what’s "correct" and what isn’t?  You need to do content discovery to identify duplicates (and near duplicates, or versions) of web pages, Office documents, PDFs and images. You then need to establish what stays and what goes. This act alone can reduce your content volumes by 40%-60%.  The benefits are significant costs savings and collapsed project timescales.

3 -- No matter how shiny your new CMS is, your content can trash it.  

Your favorite systems integrator -- or maybe your best project team -- have been tasked with building this crystal cathedral to corporate content.  Look at the project plans: where is the work plan to find out where the legacy content is hiding, what it consists of and who is using it?  More often than not it is pretty far down the priority list -- many times it is an afterthought.  Some pretty huge ECM implementations have looked great on paper, but have failed to deliver because they have overlooked  the content they have to manage.

4 -- Your content authors are human – and it shows! 

The actual content may range in quality from A+ to an F.  Plotted on a graph showing the content’s quality score against corporate, technical and compliance criteria your legacy content might be lucky to get a C+. But that is worrying:  if your content gets a pass, but only just, how prepared would you be for a real "content crisis?"  If you were hit by litigation, a product recall, or a corporate scandal, would your content hold up to scrutiny?

At times like these you will wish you had implemented the content governance model you just didn’t have time for in the project plan.  Failing to cover content compliance (an establishing policy if you don’t have one) when looking at your legacy content is simply replicating your existing problems in your new system.

5 -- We can do this the hard way or the easy way. 

Do you really know what you actually have out there?  What is published, what is stored, and what is "invisible" because it can’t be found using the search engine?  Similarly, how can you find out what is published and what is also being used, as opposed to just sitting there burning fossil fuels?   Do you know what your existing metadata implementation covers (and more importantly what it doesn’t)?  

Short answer:  you really need to carry out a thorough and in-depth analysis of it all - content, storage, logs, metadata, information architecture, links – the whole nine yards.  You can’t measure what you don’t know.

6 -- Where are the tactics and what is the strategy? 

This is where it can get really interesting.  If your IT or project guy comes to you and says "I know how to get this content into the new system – I want to build/buy a content migration tool," then you should start to prepare for that sinking feeling.  Migration should be seen as being part of the governance thought process, not an excuse to acquire a "tool" to take content from one place and put it somewhere else.  "Lift and shift" is the fastest route to replicating your current bad habits in your new system.  Legacy content has to have new life breathed into it, and it has to be crafted to maximize the benefits afforded by the new system.  Otherwise it’s back to business as usual, and in another two years time you will be looking to move your content again.

7 -- Don’t let the tail wag the dog - your legacy content can give you a great deal of insight into best practice.  

In many instances, the old system can expose what you did right, and what you did wrong.  Don’t rely on default values for your system configuration.  Default values may be the easiest choice, but they can be storing up a whole heap of pain for the future.  For example, it may seem very reasonable  that your new ECM has a default value of 60 characters for the content description metatag. But will that suit you? What if half of your existing content has a description field greater than that?  Do you truncate? Do you break the description at the complete whole word before you hit the maiximum? Do you ask your content owners what they want to do?  

The answer is a quite simple “No” to the above – you need to use ALL of these values at a level that suits your needs.  Sounds obvious?  You would be amazed at the number of international companies that get caught out by simple concepts such as this.

8 -- You may have got away with it up until now, but that was probably just dumb luck!  

Your public-facing content is your shop window to the world – the WHOLE world. You control it (you hope) and you have total responsibility for what it says – in good times and in bad.  Your web sites and all of your documents are indexed and maintained for internal use – but when the lawyers call, you want to be prepared.  Under the federal rules of civil procedure (FRCP), the discovery process is there to ensure that the parties are not subject to surprises.  What is actually sitting inside your legacy content could be a ticking time bomb.  So try to eliminate the surprises by ensuring that this legacy content gets transformed in such a way as to make you litigation-ready, and (hopefully) there won’t be any surprises!

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The following ECM implementation-related topics may also be of interest...

1. 8 things you need to know about content classification and ECM  
2. 8 ways to increase user adoption in an ECM project  
3. 8 things to look for in a document management service provider 
4. 8 ways to reduce your storage and bandwidth costs for document imaging solutions  
5. 8 things to consider when looking for ECM consultants  
6. 8 Steps to Avoid Process and Organizational Problems when Implementing an ECM System
   
7. 8 things to remember when managing ECM applications