SharePoint is widely recognised as the de-facto information management tool by a wide range of organisations.  SharePoint's ease of use, configurability, extensibility and enthusiastic adoption by end users have all helped ensure its meteoric rise in the information management space. To date Microsoft has sold over 150,000,000 seats of SharePoint and since version 2010, SharePoint is being deployed more rapidly than ever as an enterprise solution.

However, there are corporate, regulatory and legislative compliance requirements faced by organisations that over the last decade have prevented SharePoint being deployed for information governance requirements.

Historically, in order to meet compliance and information management needs, organisations adopted standalone Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM) Systems. In various guises, The UK National Archives (TNA) and similar bodies around the world prescribed and tested the functional capabilities of these systems. Manufacturers developed complex products and services designed to ensure Governance and Regulatory Compliance in their customer organisations. Due to the onerous nature of working with these products, deployment has always been challenging and adoption poor. As a result they have failed to meet the objectives they were designed to achieve.

As deployment and data volumes in SharePoint increased, vendors and organisations attempted to provide integrations designed to drive adoption and usage of EDRM products. The aim of this was to provide a familiar SharePoint front-end for business users, coupled with an EDRM system where corporate records were held at the end of the collaboration process.

This integration or "product coupling" approach is still used in the market today.  However, co-joining largely competitive products to address a specific set of functional requirements is a costly and complicated approach which has little or no positive benefit to the end user and instead adds burden and confusion in operation. The resulting infrastructure is complex and lacking in cohesion. The solution itself is expensive as are the deployment costs.

Unsurprisingly, this approach, although suiting the manufacturers and to an extent the regulatory bodies, has failed to gain adoption and resulted in some very expensive projects that still fail to capture the corporate record.

The first wave of EDRM manufacturers have been developing functionality and charging accordingly since the late 1980's. Early adopters of SharePoint requiring information governance had two options. Some organisations chose to invest in a "two-tier" solution, integrating SharePoint with a proprietary EDRM with its associated high costs, technical overlap and complexities in operation; other organisations attempted to solve the problem by heavily customising earlier versions of SharePoint, resulting in over complicated bespoke solutions, with non-supported and non-upgradable environments.

SharePoint has gradually matured in terms of functionality and scalability and SharePoint 2010 is now widely accepted as a true Enterprise Content Management proposition.

SP2010's ability to handle documents and records in terms of security, metadata management, records management and scalability has improved dramatically. For organisations that have document and records management needs and wish to use SP2010, this changes their available options significantly. SP2010 is now suitable for managing content within its own repository removing the historical need to provide a second repository.

As the gap between SharePoint functionality and a complete information governance solution continues to decrease, organisations are seeing a diminishing return for an investment in products that bridge the ERM gap.  Many are questioning whether or not they can justify the cost or operational complexity of a standalone EDRMS to plug the ever decreasing functional gap.

However in producing a product that seeks to meet the needs of a global market there are some areas of SP2010 that need to be extended before UK organisations and government bodies can fully embrace it as a compliant information governance solution.

By extending rather than customising SP2010 with some key features, SharePoint can be successfully used by any organisation to deploy fully compliant document and records management. Furthermore, this provides additional benefits by ensuring architecturally the solution is simpler, more efficient and that costs are kept in line with current budgetary constraints.

Recognising the opportunity provided through the advancement of SP2010, coupled with and the need to address the constraints of first generation EDRM solutions, Automated Intelligence (AI) was established. AI's solution ai.compliance extender provides a new approach to compliance by extending SP2010 rather than requiring separate product integration. We believe the addition of ai.compliance extender to any SP2010 deployment results in a solution that is fully capable of meeting the regulatory requirements of any organisation as well as enhancing the enterprise capabilities of the Microsoft platform.

This new approach to an old problem is an evolutionary step in the control of unstructured data in a SharePoint environment.

European SharePoint Conference 2011 delegates can benefit from a free analysis of a significant sample of their own unstructured data, to show the scale of savings and efficiencies that can be achieved through AI's solutions.  Using ai.analytics, the business case is presented showing how clients can benefit from cost savings of 50% or more through migration to a single compliant SharePoint 2010 environment, without the need for upfront capital investment.

To find out more, visit us on stand 2 or email info@automated-intelligence.com.

About Automated Intelligence Ltd

Automated Intelligence (AI) was founded on the premise that SharePoint 2010 has changed the game for information governance and records management.  By combining industry expertise and experience with vision and innovation, AI has developed a ground-breaking approach to information management in a SharePoint environment which provides quantifiable benefits to its customers and partners. 

AI's solutions automate and manage the process of cleansing, categorising and migrating unstructured data from legacy content management systems and shared drives to SharePoint 2010. Developed against the recently announced MoReq 2010 European standard, AI extends the functionality of SharePoint to enable a fully compliant solution in a simple and cost effective way.

Come to the European SharePoint Conference in Berlin.