Content is everywhere, I don't think anyone would contest that!
The emails we send, the documents we write, the presentations we give, the brochures we distribute. We organise them, store them, create then, change them, print them, share them. Content is the medium a business uses to communicate with itself and the rest of the world.
So where does records management fit into all this and why is it so important?
For me, one of the keys to understanding this is accountability.
A business makes decisions daily. These not only affect the destiny of the business itself, but possibly that of other businesses and individuals. They may have dramatic financial, health or environmental impact, both positive or negative, and the business will be held accountable for these decisions.
Recording the content used to communicate these decisions provides a business with an audit trail of thought. The who, why and what of how they got to where they are today. This history of events can be used to protect the business from blame or responsibility, to justify why things are the way they are or be used as a template for future decisions.
Ensuring these records are safe, retrievable, consistent, reliable, archived and ultimately disposed of appropriately is what records management is all about and why it's so important to every successful modern business.
Hi Roy -- It seems that a document from the document library has to be moved into the RM database in order for it to be under RM control; why can't the document stay in its original location, but be marked as a record? Did I miss something? One concern is how will a user find this document if they ordinarily know to look for it in the document library, not the RM module? When they do a search in Share will the document content still be indexed and thus be found?
ReplyDeleteHi Steve,
ReplyDeleteYes, currently when filing a record you are required to move the document from it's origional authoring location into the file plan where it becomes a record.
This isn't ideal as it means the document user has to understand the record taxonomy and this is not always appropraite. In order to find the newly filed record users are required to browse the file plan directly or search in the usual way. As long as they have the correct permissions within the file plan they will find the records they are looking for.
Allowing users to file records whilst keeping them in their origional location is a feature that is on the long term road map for the records management module. In the future we will allow records managers to set up mappings from standard share sites to locations in file plans, and the rules for when documents are filed without being moved.
Keep an eye on this blog for more talk about these and other upcomming features.
Cheers,
Roy
Hi Steve,
ReplyDeleteRecords Management is closely related to a couple other broad ECM categories: Case Management and eDiscovery. What are Alfresco's near-term release plans and longer-term product map for these functional areas? (Or maybe they're already available via partners... I'm an Alfresco newbie.)