MOSS for Enterprise Content Management

Many of our clients are struggling with the issue of how to create, store and manage documents of record. These documents might be memoranda, deliverables, filings, contracts, invoices, et cetera. These “line of business” documents are often created without following corporate standards (or following obsolete standards), and are even more often stored in a variety of ad hoc locations, making them difficult to retrieve or report on. Finally, there are often multiple versions of the same document stored in different locations, making it very difficult to determine which one is the “document of record.”

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is providing a flexible and scalable, yet remarkably easy to use solution to the above problems.   The following core features of MOSS allow organizations to create enterprise content management (ECM) solutions to match any information architecture or business model.

• Advanced Versioning—All ECM solutions must support check out of documents for editing and major and minor versions to distinguish between document preparation and published versions. MOSS meets this need out of the box.

• Content Types and Document Templates—In an attempt to standardize document formats, users hoard sample documents in their home directory and build new documents from them. This leads to preservation of inaccurate metadata and also makes it impossible for the organization to promulgate and enforce new document standards. MOSS solves this problem by allowing the proper metadata and document templates to be centrally defined and exposed in the document libraries where the documents are actually created. This makes creating a new document, with the approved format, a point-and-click operation for the information worker.

• Declaring a Record—Once a final document has been created and approved, it’s often necessary to create an “official version” that is read-only and has approved metadata. MOSS provides the ability to declare a record right from the document library where the document was created. This kicks off a workflow that converts the document to a PDF and routes it for final approval of metadata and categorization. From there, the document can be stored in MOSS’s built-in Records Center or any third-party records repository. MOSS even supports printing to paper records and automatically stamping bar codes.

• Disposition Workflows—Many documents need to be retained for a period and then either destroyed or moved to a different, long-term repository. MOSS monitors document lifecycles and can route documents for disposition either automatically, or with a human review step.

The ECM features of MOSS provide a powerful toolset that is highly flexible and often less expensive that dedicated ECM solutions. Like any ECM solution, however, it does require careful planning, thorough requirements analysis, and great communications to implement successfully.