Challenges of SharePoint Governance
SharePoint has gradually evolved from a simple collaboration tool to a de facto content management system. The volume and types of content continue to increase as there is no practical limitation of types or volumes of information that can be published to a collaborative SharePoint site. More worrisomely, SharePoint users unequipped with the knowledge of legal or compliance ramifications are growing daily. This massive growth of SharePoint presents significant information management challenges to business, as SharePoint provides inadequate controls for maintenance and disposition of content. SharePoint lacks many of the critical features of an effective information governance solution: Silos of SharePoint Servers
The large number of SharePoint installations across organizations have created siloes of repositories in which it is exceedingly challenging to understand, let alone control, the vast amounts of information that reside in these SharePoint servers. Lacking a consolidated view of SharePoint assets across an organization, compliance officers and legal counsels are hard-pressed to formulate a consistent and effective information management strategy. SharePoint fails to provide centralized control or discovery of the information being published and collaborated in SharePoint servers, which can lead to severe and damaging legal, regulatory or corporate consequences. Storage and Scalability
The long-term cost and management of storage is a huge issue since SharePoint content is stored in SQL Servers, which do not have tiered storage management, are expensive to maintain, and not scalable. SharePoint supports separation of data using multiple content databases. A content database can be configured to the granularity of each SharePoint site. There is no option to separate content at any lower granularity, based on time since last access, frequency of use, or the type of content. Large MOSS systems must therefore use many SQL Servers. This not only needlessly escalates storage and licensing costs, but also slows down performance and creates issues in scalability and recovery. Email Management
SharePoint is not designed to serve as a single repository to house enterprise content since it presents some key challenges, particularly in the area of scalability. For instance, it does not store email in bulk and cannot deal with long term preservation of email due to scalability restrictions. Its limited integration with Outlook Exchange means that there is no easy way to declare records from the Outlook interface. Lack of Categorization
Categorization is limited to content type, which means all documents of a given type will be subject to the same information management policy no matter the business requirement. A memo about the week’s lunch menu could be assigned the same retention policy as a memo exchange between executives regarding a possible acquisition. Designed as a content management product, SharePoint offers little in the way of taxonomies or categorization of documents against a classification schema, which is critical to the records management process. This limited capability results in the enforcement of unwieldy records management policies for common collaboration scenarios. For instance, the Record Center fails to provide the means to create a collection of records related to a given project that can share the same retention and disposition schedule. Instead of all files in a given project being naturally disposed of at the completion of the project, the retention and disposition schedule must be specified by the content type. Records Management
When the user declares a document as a record, the “official” record is a copy of the original item retained in the Record Center; the original document remains in the team site, with no indication that it has been declared as a record. This results in the creation of duplicate records which is compounded as multiple users declare the same document as a record, not knowing that it has already been declared as such. Since SharePoint does not support de-duplication within a document library, the creation of these duplicate records strains the storage system. Compounding the problem, scalability is further restricted by the storing of two additional XML documents alongside the original record that capture the audit and property information. Once a record is declared, users can no longer access the record directly from the document library in which the content was created because SharePoint has moved it to a separate records repository, removing the context in so doing. If a user does need to access the Records Center to view the record, security needs to be relaxed, which invariable leads to records being edited and in so doing breaking the fundamental rule of records management: records should not and cannot be changed after being declared. Legal Hold
SharePoint only allows legal holds to be placed on items within the Records Center, and not to documents held outside in the rest of SharePoint. As a result, information held in collaborative team sites that are relevant to litigation may be destroyed. In addition, to place legal hold on emails, SharePoint requires the user to perform the action separately in Exchange 2007 (and only that version). SharePoint provides two non-viable ways for users to identify records in the Records Center to place on legal hold. The first requires the user to navigate to the file structure and manually select and tag individual documents - a highly non-scalable option. The other is to search for a particular term and mass-tag the entire results list, which is highly ineffective since it is unlikely that legal hold should be applied to the entire results list. Search
SharePoint search is ideal for portal scenarios, but its effectiveness in information governance is hindered by its keyword-reliant technology, its support for only 16 file types and the Record Center design, which is conducive to the creation of duplicate content as previously discussed. Moreover, in order to get around the self-imposed limitations of folder size and restrictive naming conventions, SharePoint must sometimes auto-name file and folder names with indecipherable addendums, making the search process even more challenging.
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