Notes from Technology 4

[lmaxwell]

A Decade’s Experience of Employing an EDRMS in a Canadian Municipality

Background:
• Legal Environment – Canadian laws Open records vs. Privacy.
• City RM Program – City wide file program with retention schedules
• Hummingbird DM – controlled environment with one repository. They own this so they must use this program. The one exception is e-mail, they use Outlook. Everyone is required to save e-mail in that system. Each employee has to classify their own e-mail

Evaluation Criteria:
• Increased office productivity
• Enhanced information sharing
• Reduced volume of paper records
• Reliable and authentic e-records

Findings – Data Management
• Facilitated sharing
• Helped with job duties
• Quicker to retrieve records
• Sped up tasks
• Easier to cooperate
• Some found that it was not easier to locate documents – i.e. keyword was not in the title, not using Boolean searches

Findings – Records Management
• Assigning access rights necessary
• Difficult to classify records
• Time consuming to save e-mails and attachments
• Hummingbird requires things to be marked as records in order to save them and this is not always necessary
• Volume of paper was not reduced because paper is required as the official record and sometimes it is more convenient to have paper

Findings – Users and Training
• People with strong computer skills still found system hard to use
• Job duties are relevant to acceptance of the system, as well as how much you use the system and the variety of records received.
• People appreciated training – liked live training with demonstrations better than videos on the web

Findings – Professional Requirements for Records Managers
• Need management support
• Monitoring environmental changes such as new legislation and professional development
• Need project management skills
• Need change management skills
• Need IT skills

Conclusions:
• Overall EDRMS has been a success
• Balance between control and productivity. Technology alone does not create good record keeping. Policies and procedures are necessary
• User acceptance is critical
• Management must require people to follow requirements and to learn how to use the system

Nothing historical has been transferred to the City Archives. The City Archives does not have the money or the technology to take electronic records

Records Management and Archiving via Microsoft SharePoint

The Georgia Archives worked on a project with Microsoft and these are their findings.

Background:
• Georgia uses Open XML – an open system and all Microsoft products create documents in open XML. The content is separate from the presentation of the document and this helps simplify the migration process.
• Want to manage the life cycle of records
• Georgia has the authority to affect everyone’s records, but they don’t have the resources to do it. They want a way to affect the life of the records from the beginning.
• SharePoint is a collaboration tool
• Georgia wanted to take people that were already using SharePoint and make it where they would use the Records Management that were available to them. They selected the Department of Education and chose contracts as the records they would work with

Forms were created and melded into the contract stored on SharePoint. As a contract goes through the approval process it appears on each person’s computer as a new task. This can be set to appear on a homepage or it can be sent as an e-mail. It can also handle digital signatures.

Contracts can be sent to the “Records Center.” They are still in SharePoint and viewable, but they cannot be changed. The system can be set up so that the contract would be filed in the proper location where it should be stored.

Policy settings – these can be set up for different policies for different types of records. Different permissions classes can be set for different user groups.

Audit features track who has made changes to the record.

An expiration date can be set. The system can be set to perform a task on that date. The record could be deleted or it could be sent to the Archives.

A full-text search can be done on the records.