Welcome to the Records Management Team Blog!

Hello and welcome!

Thanks for taking the time out of your day to read our thoughts about records management. This is a team blog, and over time we will have several writers and contributors, but we promise to leave the marketing folks at home.

So who are we? Initially, there will be three contributors to this blog:

· Ethan Gur-esh and I are Program Managers in the product group, who focus on building records management capabilities into the Microsoft Office family of products. Although we work in the Office organization, we also work with our Exchange e-mail server team, our internal IT team on test deployments, and other teams across the company. Our jobs are primarily research and development, not marketing so we promise not to try to sell you anything! J

· Tina Torres is Microsoft’s Corporate Records Manager. She manages our Corporate Records Management Program, which includes enterprise-wide strategic Records and Information Management (RIM) projects and initiatives, policy guidelines, technology projects, and a traditional records center. She also provides customer benchmarking support and consulting to Microsoft customers. Tina, who is neither in the product groups nor in marketing, was our first customer.

Here’s what we are hoping to accomplish with this blog: through a combination of business and product/technology focus, we want to share with you our thoughts about records management from soup to nuts. We want to engage you in a conversation about the business challenges we are all facing, and the opportunities to address these challenges using technology, as we examine the problems of records keeping, planning, retention, disposition, litigation response, holds, and so on. (As a fair warning, we will be talking mainly about Microsoft technologies and how they can help address these problems, but hopefully that will still spur lively discussions about this particularly challenging area of business.)

We’d love for you to be involved in this conversation. So many of the customers and practitioners we talk to are still overwhelmed by how complex these problems are, and don’t yet have a coherent framework in which to think about solutions. We want this blog to be a valuable forum for you – a place to discuss records management and to help figure out that common solution framework.

And your feedback is super-important to us! While we could talk all day about how we think our technology can help solve some of these problems, we also want your input to help guide us on making future versions of Microsoft products and technologies even better.

 

Jason Cahill, Lead Program Manager