The Business Side -- Is there a separate "Compliance / RM edition" of Office SharePoint Server 2007?

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There are many challenges in getting an RM department and an IT department to work together: cultural issues, procedural issues, and more. But one of the first challenges for working with IT is simply acquiring RM software -- in many organizations,  hardware & software purchases, including systems used for RM, are accounted for in the IT department's budget. And the metrics that IT often uses to make purchasing decisions usually don't favor RM considerations. (This may be changing thanks to the increased importance of compliance for many organizations, but it's likely to remain a challenge for Records Managers for the near future.)

Fortunately, organizations that choose Office SharePoint Server 2007 won’t have to deal with this disconnect. :-)

We've stated on this blog from the beginning that for a records management program to succeed in an organization, all of the organization's content management systems need to have appropriate RM capabilities. For that reason, all of the Records Management capabilities described in this blog are available in Office SharePoint Server 2007. There will NOT be separate RM or “compliance” editions of Office SharePoint Server specific to records management.

This can have a major impact on how records managers and IT departments justify investments in RM software. IT departments have several reasons to deploy the Office SharePoint server 2007 in addition to its Records Management abilities. (Here’s a link to the "Top 10 benefits of Office SharePoint Server". Only item #3 talks about Records Management.) So within your organization the RM group won’t be the only people asking IT to deploy this system. And from the IT department’s perspective, the “Return on Investment” for RM within Office SharePoint Server 2007 is much more palatable – you aren’t requiring them to deploy an RM application in addition to their Content Management systems; and the business benefits include more than reduced legal & regulatory risk.

So not only can the 2007 release help you be more successful at implementing records management programs in your organizations, but you'll also have an easier time getting IT to acquire & deploy this system in the first place.

Thanks for reading!

- Ethan Gur-esh, Program Manager.