Hi Emma,



I spent a long time setting up and managing traditional EDRMS in different sectors, and the one thing I can reiterate is that a lot of users find them cumbersome and annoying to use. Great tools in principle for Records Managers, but you have to fight endlessly to get users to use them and use tends to be inconsistent.



Office 365 by comparison is generally considered by users (in my experience) to be easier to use and better integrated into Office applications, email and the desktop.



O365 is not however, a fully functional records management system. I spent quite a lot of time this year assessing O365 against MoReq2 and ISO 16175. You can either use the new Advanced Data Governance features (Labels and Retention Policies) which is where Microsoft are driving all their investment, or the older features, which don't cover as much of the O365 content, are not where MS are investing, and mean you have to manage retention and disposal across different applications.



The main areas of concerns for me are around Labels and Retention Policies are:



 - Immutability of records (there are things you can change once an item has been declared as a record, and the declaration process is not as intuitive as per traditional EDRMS)

 - Disposition Review  (not embedded through-out RM functionality, and flawed in terms of oversight and management)

 - Event Triggers (not embedded through-out RM functionality, and flawed in terms of the way they are implemented, need to be triggered "ex post facto")

 - Defensible disposition (no stubs, some limitations on audit data)

 - Aggregation (retention driven at content level, not on containers)

 - Lack of out of the box paper records capability



I teach a course on O365 RM, and it takes me about a day and a half to talk through the different flaws (and possible workarounds), so that's a really brief summary.



That said, there are major benefits to O365 as a Records Management tool. Have we ever been able to do in place records management for email before? Most EDRMS rely on you moving email over via some additional plug-in. O365 offers an opportunity to records management a lot more content than just Office documents (from instant messages to social media content) and with two complementary approaches.



I don't think either EDRMS or O365 is a perfect solution, it depends on your aims and objectives, your staffing, and the risk appetite of your organisation. However, Office 365 as a content platform seems to being rolled out in most organisations I work with anyway, so you've only got 3 options:



 - Bury your head in the sand and hope it goes away

 - Adopt it as your records management system

 - Integrate it into your records management system



Good luck!



Graham Snow



-----Original Message-----

From: The Information and Records Management Society mailing list <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Emma Harvey-Woodason

Sent: 18 November 2019 08:12

To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: SharePoint v EDRM systems



The Welsh Govt uses an EDRMS at present to manage records but there is some debate about whether SharePoint would be better.  My experience of SharePoint is limited to SharePoint 2013 and, as the records management functions had not been implemented when I left, I have no direct experience of managing records using SharePoint although am aware of some of the issues.  I am interested in any feedback on whether SharePoint can deliver the same level of records management functionality as an EDRMS.  What are the advantages/disadvantages of both systems?  In an ideal world would you opt for SharePoint or an EDRMS?



Emma Harvey-Woodason

Head of Information & Archives

Welsh Government



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