The Question
There was a LinkedIn question posted recently and I though I would expand on it here:
“What do you see as the inherent limitations with SharePoint as a records management platform?”
It is interesting that VERS got a mention. It was a standard from the 90's and it does not take into account current technology. I think the definition of Records Management needs to be updated to reflect current trends and technology rather that one from 20 years ago.
As Dave stated:
"If you do get a system that is 100% compliant you will more often find that it is simply unusable from an end user's perspective and indeed a financial perspective"
Says it all in one statement... Looking at Trim, Objective, Documentum, they are horrible to use (IMO) but might be considered by some as "Compliant" because they do things the 90's way with VERS. Products can also be "Self Certified" for VERS so I wonder how truly valid VERS is??
Reasons for VERS
Another point, VERS is supposed to provide:
- Reduced cost of paper record storage
- Reduced cost and time to respond to FOI requests
- Reduced cost for transfers of records
- Reduced risk through capturing and maintaining accurate and authentic digital records
- Increased accountability through the improved transparency in government business processes
- Reduced time required to recall archival records
- Significantly improved accessibility to records over time and distance
- Increased discovery and reuse of records
I wonder how many organisations actually measure or get these benefits?
Deconstructing VERS
Lets break it down:
- Reduced cost of paper record storage
Any electronic storage will reduce the cost of paper records as long as you stop PRINTING!
- Reduced cost and time to respond to FOI requests
Given the recent “Thompson” and “Slipper” issues in Government where FWA took 3 years to come up with a statement, this is clearly not happening.
- Reduced cost for transfers of records
Transfer to where? I would love to see some metrics on this. With the advent of email, most “Records” would be emailed as uncontrolled copies.
- Reduced risk through capturing and maintaining accurate and authentic digital records
This is a training, culture and governance issue and has nothing to do with Software.
- Increased accountability through the improved transparency in government business processes
I doubt this could be measured… happy to have someone give me some examples??
- Reduced time required to recall archival records
One of my pet hates… what exactly is archival? Do they mean getting a Tape and doing a database restore then getting the record back? Or is it about going to a big warehouse and hunting down boxes of paper? In the electronic age, it usually means “Keep it online but move it to cheaper storage”, thus “Archiving” is a storage policy and it is never “offline”.
- Significantly improved accessibility to records over time and distance
See the statement above… if the “archival” policy is about storage, then this does not apply.
- Increased discovery and reuse of records
Any basic electronic storage mechanism has some (simple or advanced) search capability. Often it is actually a training, culture and governance issue and has nothing to do with Software.
It’s OLD!!
With VERS there is no support for any common formats, it only allows:
- PDF (Acrobat 5)
- PDF-A
- Text (Including XML)
- TIFF
- JPEG
- MPEG-4 (under litigation from AT&T and Apple over patent infringements)
There is no support for:
- OpenXML
- ODF formats
- MP3
- WebM
- WMV
All of these files would need to be converted to one of the “supported formats”. In addition no encryption is allowed, so no passwords are allowed on files and you can’t have secure PDF files.
Digital signatures are MANDATORY. While I don’t have an issue with this, many organisations struggle with digital signatures and either don’t have them issued or don’t use them. It also means that you need
“a copy of the certificate stored in a secure place on the recordkeeping
system”
This means that you CAN’T be compliant.
Metadata
It recommends 159 bits of metadata!!! Really!!! That is simply not useable.
Finally
It isn’t cheap… if you want to do it properly, it must have a very strong financial backing and commitment! So going out and buying that “cheap” $20,000 add-on to SharePoint won’t make you compliant!
