SharePoint is used across government agencies for many purposes and houses a range of electronic information. Management of this data is vital to protecting and interfacing with the American public. Effective management of data housed in SharePoint requires strong information governance. The journey to develop information governance for SharePoint begins with an understanding of the software, its full range of capabilities and features, as well as the current enterprise environment. At the FBI, the governance plan also required differentiation between past and current versions of the software and understanding different site types and uses. The formation of a governance team comprised of diverse stakeholders, including legal, IT, RIM, IT security, and ediscovery professionals is an essential first step. The development of the governance plan and required documents, including the charter, is critical. Additionally, implementing records and information management within the SharePoint environment requires integration of a vision across people, processes, technology, and policies of diverse stakeholders and for the final acceptance of end users. Collaboration with other agencies and coordination with stakeholders are integral components of the plan. Planning for an overall framework includes gap analysis, establishing rules, content types, security, and retention policies. Finally, governance must include a roll out plan to ensure that SharePoint governance is effectively applied across the organization.

Microsoft SharePoint has seen grassroots adoption in many industries due to its power and simplicity and tighter integration with the Microsoft suite of products. While SharePoint empowers end users with the ability to collaborate and to manage content, it also makes it easy for any enterprise implementation to quickly turn into chaos if there are no proper controls or governance mechanisms in place. An AIIM survey in 2010 on SharePoint reported that “governance is sadly lacking in the majority of installations, with little thought being given to e-discovery, retention policies, and most of all, classification schemes and metadata standards.” Without proper governance, it is easy for SharePoint sites to become glorified shared drives or disorganized repositories yielding very little business value. We believe that governance is key to the successful implementation of SharePoint to yield business value. SharePoint governance must include the set of policies, processes, organizational constructs, roles, and responsibilities that are required to guide, direct, and control how SharePoint capabilities are used to accomplish business goals. As part of its SharePoint 2010 launch, Microsoft introduced a Governance Model, which we believe doesn’t fully address the needs of an enterprise. We believe that the Microsoft model is incomplete in many respects, especially around application management, business support and services, and stakeholder management. For example, the Microsoft model doesn’t address processes such as demand management, release management, etc., which are key to managing demand and deploying applications and/or sites. Based on our own experiences as well as industry best practices, we have developed a more comprehensive governance framework for SharePoint addressing many of the gaps in the Microsoft model. We believe that our framework along with implementation of ITIL processes would enable organizations to stand up SharePoint as a service providing the right balance between user empowerment and IT controls. The session will not only cover “what” are the governance standards and guidelines, but also provide insights on “how” governance can be implemented and managed including organizational model, processes, roles, and responsibilities.

Developing and implementing an ERM program that includes laws, regulations, and standards for electronic records and systems - even in very large companies - is possible. It takes the vision of expanding a primarily paper-based records management (RM) program into one that truly includes records in all media. It requires - for example - executive support; RM leadership; RM, IT and Legal collaboration; funding, and, of course, a plan. Join Susan as she discusses how to incorporate regulatory requirements and external standards to help develop a trustworthy ERM program that enables compliant retention and defensible disposition - even for data (e.g., certain social media content) that may or may not be considered a corporate record. Tips and techniques for applying de facto standards (such as DoD 5015.2, and the various flavors of MoReq) as well as ISO 15489 will be discussed.

Today’s connected world depends on content. But it’s harder than ever to manage content, collaborate around it, share it, and move it through business processes that require collaboration with others inside the business and with those outside – like customers, partners, vendors, and mobile employees. This new world needs new rules. A SpringCM customer discusses how cloud solutions change content management and transform ECM forever.

In November 2011, Ultimate Software was the recipient of a Forrester Groundswell Award for the effectiveness of its social customer community, showing that you can achieve innovation in social technology applications while still achieving key business and organization goals.  As a SaaS provider of People Management solutions, it’s vital that Ultimate respond quickly to the latest changes from taxing authorities and regulatory agencies, providing timely and accurate communications to customers.   Managing related content in a way that enables rapid and dynamic communication is only possible through the application of well-organized structure and controls including single-source authoring. This session looks at how Ultimate Software’s Content and Communications team is continuously improving upon how to collect, create and manage information used to support a dynamic customer communications environment.

Information governance has become the new corporate buzzword for gaining control over wayward information assets and processes, including SharePoint repositories, official records, emails, and social media. However, many enterprises don’t really understand what governance is, much less what is involved with turning the idea of governance into an actionable plan. Priscilla will moderate this discussion between an experienced panel of users, consultants, and service providers who will provide their perspectives on what information governance is; what approaches are working in their organizations or with their clients; and what mistakes have been made that you should avoid - especially things that just don't work. This will not just be a technology discussion but will focus on the processes, project, people, and change management issues that need to be addressed as part of this effort. Questions will not only be accepted from the audience but we will challenge our respective Twitter and/or Linkedin, etc. followers to add to the mix before and during the session.

Information management professionals recognize the constant dilemma of providing tools that enable flexible collaboration between internal and external parties, and at the same time address the dual needs for control and governance in work processes. This challenge is by no means a new one, and it gets new vitality whenever "new and sexy breakthrough products," whether hardware and software, are launched. Discover how Statoil, a Norwegian-based international energy company, is facing these challenges. Peter will also look forward and discuss current initiatives that will address changes that are expected in coming years.

The demands of information management—and the pace with which they’re evolving—threaten to outstrip the capabilities of many IT organizations. In the face of these demands, the need to optimize infrastructure and to effectively align existing and new technologies has increased exponentially. In fact, the line between business optimization and infrastructure optimization has blurred. The lack of either compromises competitive strength. As if this were not pressure enough, smaller budgets and shorter ROI requirements leave very little margin for error. With the volume of information exploding, the more varied the content types and the more systems on which they reside, the more important unified information governance and visibility become. Organizations with an effective information governance strategy understand the business value and risk of their information, are able to maximize their current investments and optimize their key applications, consistently apply and enforce policies, and produce specific information when required. As organizations evaluate private, hybrid, and public cloud solutions, these same capabilities must still be considered. The information and its value and risk don’t change just because there are new places to put it. And, what’s the true gain if “the mess on the ground” just gets punted into the cloud? Organizations need to think holistically about information governance, infrastructure optimization, and business optimization to ensure that only information management and governance best practices float to the clouds.

Traditional records management has resulted in 5-10% of enterprise content being managed under policy. The remaining content is stored in non-obtrusive platforms, such as shared drives, email, SharePoint sites, wikis, etc. Something new is happening in records management that has nothing to do with specific features or functionality. Records Management 2.0 leverages new concepts, capabilities, and a viral platform (SharePoint) to achieve unobtrusive, transparent content governance and compliance and become the platform that provides organizations with the opportunity to manage 80-90% of enterprise content under policy. This is a paradigm shift for traditional CRMs and enterprises alike. It gives organizations the opportunity to establish a game-changing platform for content governance in a multi-repository context and enables records management to establish broader corporate relevance and value.

In this interactive conversation, you'll be introduced to the problem of jargon. How we all speak different languages and the “why didn’t you just say that before” syndrome. And that's not to mention the different levels of information and technical literacy that exists among employees. A volunteer Tweet Off to illustrate the jargon problem is next. People will tweet a word or phrase from their application that they always have to explain to users or IT to the hash tag #madesensetome (or similar). I will ask people to volunteer to explain the jargon to the group as others continue to tweet. The volunteer will need to use the explanation in a demo with me as the user. I will have primed the feed with a few suggestions so that we have starter words. Volunteers win a prize! I'll pass out mini-cards with tips for better communication between Information Managers, IT, and Users.

Cloud computing has spawned a new industry with many different technologies and applications including new approaches to document management, workflow, and storage not to mention new approaches to buying and managing software. These cloud technologies are more than evolutionary – they are challenging, and in some cases revolutionizing, the very roots of traditional document and records management. Add in the fact that we still have paper-based systems in place, existing legacy document/records management systems in place, and now cloud-based document/records management applications that dramatically extend the reach of a single person or corporation, and we are looking at the need to completely rethink how we do business.

This presentation will help the user understand cloud-collaboration technologies including document management, records management, preservation, legal, workflow, and storage. Mr. Porter-Roth will also review benefits and risks, as well at touch upon emerging governance issues. Because the cloud-collaboration technologies are changing rapidly, there is no clear strategy or road map that has emerged for adopting these technologies, but we will discuss what are the current options and trade-offs.

In a world flooded by information and amidst a knowledge economy, does compliance really matter anymore?  Is it merely reduced to a cost of doing business? Is compliance a real driver for our content management efforts? This session will explore the realities of compliance, recordkeeping, and content management in a world driven by the need to take advantage of new technologies to stay competitive and litigation risk.

Gartner predicts that 20% of workers will use social networks as their primary vehicle for business communications by 2014. With an overwhelming amount of electronically stored information (ESI) moving to the cloud and social networks, corporations need to take practical steps to protect themselves in the event of litigation. The Assistant General Counsel of KAYAK.com and eDiscovery attorney and Senior Manager of Litigation Technology from Goodwin Procter LLP will address the complexities of coming from a cloud based environment and how to create a repeatable and defensible eDiscovery response plan to minimize risk and lower litigation expense.

This session will present the challenges encountered and some working solutions to a key requirement of digital preservation—ongoing data integrity of the archive. The solutions were developed cooperatively by two vendors in conjunction with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. State-of-the-art tape in-drive data validation plays a key role in ensuring ongoing data integrity along with fixity checking from the point of file creation through ingest into the preservation system.

There is a dark secret shared by almost every company: they keep electronic content forever. Over the past 10 years, storage became less expensive; the fear of wrongful deletion (spoliation) kept lawyers on edge; and classifying information for disposition purposes was manual and expensive. Yet, today through a combination of technology, operations, and defensible methodologies; organizations CAN begin to auto-classify their legacy content – identifying critical content for preservation and disposing the irrelevant clutter. You will learn the technology and legal aspects of creating a process to effectively manage information throughout its lifecycle.

What factors need to be considered for social media content to be treated as records by an organization? The business and legal values of content created on social media will be outlined, as will various approaches for capturing this content. The critical considerations of the social media technology will be presented; addressing content stored both inside and outside of an organization's firewall. To conclude, policies are critical in the management of social media and the required elements will be outlined.