Dear all

A while ago I asked a query about what members were doing about
encouraging best practice in the use of shared drives and approaches to
email management, in particular .pst files (email "archives"). I am very
grateful for all the helpful responses, in particular the excellent and
helpful comments from Mark, Clare, Sally, Adeline, Karen, Sara and Susan
- and apologise that I did not have chance to respond to all of you
personally. 
However, I have attempted to summarise the responses below and hope that
others find them useful.

In our organisation we have written guidance for staff on how to manage
their email (involving records management principles as far as
possible), and have written guidance for staff on where to store
electronic information (i.e. the shared drives, not their personal
drives), including naming conventions etc. We have also developed
guidance for the administrators of the shared drive folders to help them
to manage them appropriately and use appropriate folder structures. 
We are undertaking a project to assist Directorates to review their
shared drives and "spring clean" out of date information. Due to the
number of shared drives in our organisation this will probably take
about 2 years to fully complete.

Many thanks
Catherine Redfern


QUESTION
Has anyone undertaken a review of their organisation's use of
Shared/Network Drives in Windows for storing electronic records? If so,
is there anyone who would be willing to share their process / results /
thoughts with me? The impetus in my own organisation for undertaking
this work is firstly, to address the ever growing amount of server space
being taken up by electronic information (when about 10 minutes of
searching the drives reveals many large and out of date items that can
be deleted, freeing up several gigabytes in one swoop) and secondly to
assist culture change to move the organisation gradually towards the
concept of electronic records management and corporate shared filing
space, and to improve the naming conventions being used and the folder
structures to make them more logical so that information is easy to
find. 

Also I would be interested to know if anyone has a policy on how long to
store .pst files (email "archive" files). We are recommending that if an
email is an important Trust record which needs to be retained for
legal/statutory/operational purposes etc then it should be saved onto
the relevant paper or electronic file and kept in accordance with our
retention policy, as the subject/topic of the email determines its
retention. However, people are still creating these "email archive"
files (.pst format) as a back-up, because their mailboxes get too large
(although we are trying to prevent this) or because they are afraid to
delete their emails - and I am wondering if anyone has a retention
policy on these files. Are they comparable to the old paper "day files"
(which we only keep for 6 months)? To add a bit of background, we do not
have a policy of deleting individual emails from mailboxes after a
certain period (e.g. 3 months).


APPROACH TO SHARED DRIVES

* We created another drive with a basic file plan, gave everyone two to
three months to transfer their folders and documents before the existing
drives where removed. In order for it to succeed, you need regular
communications through various channels (so people don't have the excuse
- I didn't know) and make it sound definite that the old drives will no
longer be available. Your IT team will be able to cut them off. Just in
case anyone does happen to be away or forget (it always happens) IT will
still be able to recover documents for a few months after.

* We are on a 1 year project looking to implement a document management
system. This work is covering everything from setting retention
schedules to producing an information management policy. We are also
covering naming conventions, using version control ands where to store
information. We are tackling our shared drives with a target of
revamping them to make more user friendly so that we create a corporate
folder structure so teams know where to save their information and can
share it a lot easier.

* We started by wanting to improve our document and record keeping to
respond better to FOI, leverage our knowledge, make data easier to find
etc. We did lots of preparation (records survey, retention schedule,
business process analysis) which culminated in writing a records
management handbook. This covered what should be kept, where it should
be kept, what format it should be kept in, what name it should be give
and how long it should be kept for. We rolled out the handbook via a
network of Records Management Champions and asked everyone in the
business to set aside a day to implement the policies against their My
Documents and shared drive areas. We then asked them to repeat this on
another day about a month later in their email storage. We considered
this a big change project and ran it as such. Overall we reduced file
storage by 25%. We have put in some technological "backstops" to prevent
further build up. We limit My Documents Storage to 150MB. From the point
that the policy was ready to rollout it took us about 6 months to pilot
and run the clear out days in every business unit. We had a team of 4
(genuinely working flat out) covering 3,500 people in about 18
locations. This did not include any of the planning and preparation for
rollout, communications planning, training the Champions etc. All in all
it was a year's effort, and two years from start to finish if you
include the original business case writing, the survey etc. We didn't
include developing a business classification scheme which I think we
should have done but we were under pressure to generate results. But we
did include guidance on creating and naming shared folders and working
within your team to develop a useful structure.

* We are currently testing Microsoft's Single Instance Storage server
(SIS). This system trawls your data to find duplicate files, keeps one
master copy & replaces all the duplicates with a 2Kb pointer. This
should help us to reduce the amount valid data we store on our shared
drives. Sorry it is too early to give you any opinions or results from
the trial.

* We worked with the IT dept to implement our RM policies, Procedures
and Guidelines by tackling this problem. We tackled each dept and got
them to put aside some time on separate two days to sort through their
shared drives and personal stores on one day and their email on the
next. We directed them to the new policies and procedures they could use
to to this, e.g. Retention Schedule, naming convention, version control,
guidance on what to keep as a record etc. The IT dept then came round to
that dept 4 weeks afterwards and restricted their personal space to
150mb and their email to 50mb. We had a network of champions in each
department that we had trained to use the policies and they assisted us
with the organisation of this in their dept.

* Rationalising of server space and the storage habits of employees
around the Trust has started to happen as a by-product of another piece
of work (business case for EDRMS). In investigating what our current
habits are I have seen the need for the documents you mentioned and are,
to put it bluntly, on my to-do list. I have though started to get the
cultural mind set in place to lay the foundations, and am gathering
appropriate information as I go along, which will feed into these
particular documents.  A policy on shared servers and the use of
personal hard drives for storing corporate information will be written
as part of the RM portfolio. Each member of staff is allocated 250 mg
allowance of server space (this is over and above the shared/dept'l
server spaces). How we actively monitor what is stored in their personal
drive has not been tackled and I tend to feel that due to the nature of
the beast, and the lack of capacity to monitor it as tightly as I might
like, success in ensuring appropriate emails are captured as part of a
records file will end up coming down to education and policy rather than
hands on policing 

* I added specific guidance into RM induction talks: 
- e-record habits of firstly not storing them onto personal hard drives
(as has been a very common practice pre-RM days);  
- people are afraid to delete documents "just in case" so I include
info. about retention schedules etc 
- Sharing drives habits: do's and don'ts. DO ensure doc'ts are stored
there; DO ensure that housekeeping of said drive is built into
daily/weekly routines so it doesn't become a graveyard of unnecessary
records; DO follow file name conventions (I give them the format), etc ;
DON'T allow access to your shared drives to "all users" options; DON'T
store confidential or inappropriately sensitive information in there if
it is not warranted; DON'T store corporate records elsewhere as it
prevents other colleagues from accessing that information, etc. 


APPROACH TO MANAGING EMAILS

* An automatic e-mail deletion policy from mailboxes (2 years - I wanted
12 months but didn't get it). 

* Workshops for managers on why e-mail management is good for business. 

* Training staff on how to delete/move e-mails to relevant shared
folders, especially large backlogs. 

* Telling them NOT to auto-archive and explaining why it's bad practice
(just moves the problem to another location etc). 

* Workshops on improving shared folder structures and titles so that
business critical e-mails can be moved into the relevant shared folder.
. 
* If you say yes to "archiving" emails they normally get sent to the C:\
as far as I can tell. So no back-up if things go wrong. 

* If we think emails should be saved we save them using saving your
message as: 'message format' (.msg) The saved message only show as a
particular format symbol they don't show abbreviations anymore in our
system. 

* Attachments are the big problem as they get a virtual link after 3
months. Can't read them anymore after about 6 if I am not mistaken. We
have saved messages, though, which are saved as messages into our filing
system which we can still read after at least 1 1/2 years. Not sure how
that circumvents the links being cut etc. 

* ICT here targets people who use loads amount of space and the inbox
nearly always gets emptied and I don't think they get saved in pst
format. Perhaps people here do not know about the pst format. 

* .pst files were the bain of our lives! We got the IT dept to agree to
switch off the auto archive prompt and during the clear out we began to
encourage people to sort through them and extract records. This was the
most un-popular bit of the roll out. IT had agreed that they would
delete all .pst files after a year, so we had that big stick for anyone
who was unwilling to co-operate. Part of the problem is, if people are
using these files correctly (rather than a big bucket) it's difficult to
offer them that Outlook functionality to work differently in another
package.

*.pst files are not permitted; like you we have a policy that emails
should be stored on the relevant file in .msg format to retain the
integrity. I have a current change request in to globally remove the
option to create .pst files in Outlook. We are tackling people with
existing .pst files one by one via their Champion to weed these out.
Mailboxes are limited to 50MB. 

* Emails I have tackled, like you, by getting people used to their
content being the factor on it's retention life, not it's format. Again
this is a change of practice - people still just bulk save to their
archives - some of them now have archives of their archives they are so
large!! They are storing the overfill now onto external discs and only
those who have done it know where they are kept. Not great at all. All
this has to be addressed in the e-mail policy. It is an ongoing job to
drip feed changes of ideas into the culture isn't it!! Here email in-box
allowances are: 250 mg per client in email accounts (we use GroupWise).
IT staff are allowed 400mg each due to the potential traffic they can
receive as IT support staff. When emails are archived they are stored
onto individual personal server space. I have also released brief
articles into appropriate newsletters that list out do's and don'ts on a
different RM subject to back up the policies so they won't come as such
a shock. Last week I just released the Top Tips For Email Management

END


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