tfpl blog

Where is data protection going?

This week, TFPL hosted the latest CiG seminar Data Protection - is it really possible or just a pipe-dream?  There were presentations from Jonathan Holbrook, the Head of Data Protection Practice Private Sector at the Information Commissioner's Office and Sunny Bath, the Data Protection Officer at Euromoney Institutional Investor (EII).   Martin Sanderson, from our Records Management Team, attended and reports below:

"When attending a Data Protection meeting in Europe in 2007 I was surprised to hear that the UK was reported as the weakest European member in implementing DP with Spain the strongest.  Perhaps Jonathan provided the answer to this position in explaining the lack of ICO’s enforcement powers or indeed the lack of interest by the press (for their own reasons) to push this as a key public issue.

However I was encouraged on hearing how seriously EII has taken Data Protection, and the level of effort and investment they have put into this over the years.  Their starting point was to carry out a thorough audit of the personal information they were holding across the organisation.  I wonder how many other organisations have even taken this first step in bringing their management of personal information under control. Recent events in the UK suggest there is a long way to go but until we witness a stronger enforcement regime in the UK I cannot see this happening".

See more about this event on Fenton Research blog 'But why do you need to know?'

My notes from TFPL's SharePoint conference

Val has spent the last month fending off phone calls, e-mails, texts and bended knee entreaties from people pleading to be given a precious ticket to TFPL’s SharePoint conference.

The big day finally arrived: Tuesday April 1 2008.  The 140 seat Sir Henry Wellcome Auditorium was packed out all day.

It didn’t disappoint. The speakers gave a great overview of what organizations in the UK are doing with SharePoint, and the opportunities and issues presented by what looks like becoming an all pervasive information environment.

Here are the notes I tapped (as quietly as I could) into my little Asus Eee pc, as I listened to the speakers

WHERE HAS SHAREPOINT COME FROM AND WHERE IS IT GOING? Jeremy Bentley, CEO SmartLogic

How Microsoft’s rivalry with Google has influenced SharePoint’s development
The first release of SharePoint, was simply aiming to replace the shared drive.  After several iterations, and huge investment, it is now aiming for much more than that:  a genuine enterprise information platform.

The difference between the second release, in 2003, and MOSS 2007 is $800 million of development.  Most of this massive development spend went on improving the search facility. This was prompted by the threat to Microsoft posed by Google's move into corporate market.

Gartner said that the main fault of the earlier versions of SharePoint was the poor quality of its search functionality.  Microsoft  had not put significant resources into the search features because they didn’t regard Google as a threat.  Google was concentrating on search in the world wide web, rather than inside organizations.

The enterprise search market has until recently been dominated by Autonomy, Endeca and Fast: three relatively small companies.  Google was the first of the big boys to enter the enterprise search market. Google's enterprise search offering was radically simpler, cheaper and quicker to implement than its competitors.  Implementing Autonomy involves nine months of building taxonomies and developing teaching scripts and training the Autonomy tool.  Implementing Google's enterprise search tools takes one afternoon. 

There is no way that companies the size of  Autonomy, Endeca and Fast could compete with Google.  Google's R and D spend per year is bigger than the combined market value of all of these companies.  Once Google went into the Search market then other big boys piled in:  IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.

Search is the new portal for individuals into their information world.  On the web people use the Google search interface and never bother with any classifications or metadata fields.  They expect the same inside their organization.  MOSS 2007 is the first SharePoint release to address the search requirement of people in modern organizations.

What is missing from MOSS 2007?
SharePoint does not have support for:

• classification
• taxonomy and ontology
• metadata integration
• guided navigation

SharePoint only supports controlled vocabularies in the form of flat-lists.  Information scientists within Microsoft lost the battle to support multi-level taxonomies because of the focus on improving search.

SharePoint as an enterprise information platform
The addition of enterprise search functionality means that SharePoint can claim to provide an all embracing information platform, spanning the gap between the (Microsoft) operating system and the Microsoft Office tools (Word, Outlook, Excel) that people use to create and receive information.  It fills the gap by providing the collaboration environment people need to work with each other, and a search portal which the organization can shine over as many of its content repositories as it wishes

Massive Growth of SharePoint
Microsoft  claims to have sold 100million SharePoint client licenses worldwide. Even if only one tenth of these is being used that is still massive

SHAREPOINT FOR RECORDS MANAGEMENT  Case study, DEFRA, Roger Smethurst, Head of Information and Records Management

DEFRA’s decision not to go ahead with EDRM
In 2005 DEFRA launched a 500 user pilot of a National Archives approved EDRM system. They decided not to go ahead with the implementation which would have cost £1,000 per user per year.

They looked again at their requirements and decided that:

• Helping colleagues collaborate was a key requirement
• DEFRA didn’t need their system to meet the whole of the National Archives statement of functional requirements for ERM.  They whittled the TNA requirements down to two pages of A4 to focus on what they really needed.
• They would use as much software already in DEFRA, or already purchased, as possible
• They wouldn't go for a one size fits all approach:  if a case management system was working well, DEFRA are happy for people to keep records in that system.
• They would aim to provide colleagues with the tools they need to collaborate, and then build ways of harvesting records from those collaborative environments. 

Customisation of SharePoint to meet records retention requirements

• SharePoint is based on sites:  ‘my sites’ for individuals, ‘team sites’ as a shared collaborative space with colleagues.  Retention schedules cannot be applied to records in team sites,  but documents can be moved to  ‘records centre’ sites where retention rules can be applied. 
• Out of the box MOSS 2007 provides a router to move documents needed as records from a team site to a records centre.  But it leaves a copy in the team site, causing problems of duplication and confusion over what is the official version.
• Defra developed their own customisation: when a document is moved to a records centre a link is left behind in the team site, but no actual copy of the document.  This means that people can still access the document from the team site but they are accessing the record copy in the records centre.

Customisation of sharepoint to accommodate a fileplan structure

• MOSS 2007 does not include the ability to apply a fileplan.  DEFRA have included the fileplan path in the URL of each team site.  They have customized SharePoint to harvest the information included in the URL of each team site and include it in the metadata of records that originated from that site

Governance of team sites within SharePoint

• If you don't control the implementation you get  'SharePoint sprawl’, so many team sites you don't know what to do with them.
• Power users can set up team sites and chose a structure for the team site.  They need to talk to records managers when they set it up to decide where it sits within the SharePoint structure.
• Defra set up an Information Architecture Board, chaired by Roger, to oversee the growth of the system.

USING SHAREPOINT TO SIMPLIFY THE LANDSCAPE  Learning and Skills Council case study:   John Quinn (DCFS) and Alexis Castillo Soto (LSC)

In LSC  MOSS 2007 provides  one enterprise search across the LSC intranet, legacy shared drives, SharePoint team sites and SharePoint my sites. All of these areas are simply viewed as SharePoint libraries.  It has made it far easier for colleagues to understand the information picture within LSC.

LSC have taken off the administration rights that users by default are given over their 'my site'.  This is because with admin rights users can:

• add web-parts which are prone to fall over,increasing the support requirement
• create team workspaces underneath their my site which are invisible to the organisation

USING SHAREPOINT FOR COLLABORATION:  KPMG case study,  Ceri Hughes 

• Use of 'my site' is an important part of the implementation.  An individual's my site functions as their equivalent of a people directory entry, enabling others to find them and find out about them.  It also functions as their window out on the rest of KPMG, they can set up RSS feeds to resources inside SharePoint and beyond, and set up links to key people they want to network with
• Colleagues want an equivalent of Google:  Now SharePoint offers one search over many different content repositories instead of separate search engines.
• Big generation divide:  younger 'generation Y' colleagues are asking for blogs, wikis and to set up Facebook groups, others are suspicious or nervous of these tools
• Internal blogs and podcasts have significantly raised the visibility of leadership figures in KPMG
• Managing expectations is important.   Allowing people to use wikis doesn't mean that we will get a KPMG equivalent of wikipedia in six months time!
• Tried to use it out of the box ( so able to upgrade easily to service pack 2),  but the interface was too simple and therefore KPMG have customised it.
• Without governance around setting up of team sites it can get quickly out of control
• Migrating legacy Sharepoint 2003 into the MOSS 2007 has not proved as easy as one might suppose

USING SHAREPOINT AS AN INTERNET Steven Buckley, Christian Aid

• Christian Aid did not waste time and  money rebranding SharePoint (after all it is only an application, and you don't rebrand Word or Outlook)
• Using SharePoint for their intranet, and as a collaboration system
• When deciding the  structure of team sites they didn't show people SharePoint. Instead they just asked people what they wanted to store, how they wanted to find it and what communications feature they wanted in their collaborative enviroment.
• Two years ago Demos wrote a report on 'De-organisation' a term for the phenomenon whereby the links that tie staff to the organisation are weakened through practices like remote working. To de-organise successfully organisations need to create alternative sources of stability and certainty. A collaboration system could be that source of certainty.  A collaboration system is of even more importance to a remote worker than  to a deskbound officer.
• It was important that SharePoint wasn't seen as yet another place to store things, that it is seen as reducing the number of places things are stored.  The day a team was trained on SharePoint its network drives were turned off, with the content already having been migrated to SharePoint.
• People can elect to join specific audiences and communities.  This drives the type of content that is pushed out to them, and even what you see on the intranet home page.  People can subscribe to alerts from other sites so they keep abreast of what interests them.
• Each team has a blog, they are encouraged to put up news and comments on their team blogs as they occur to them.  The central communications teams subscribes to all these feeds from each team and can pick up on stories that are of interest to the whole organisation.
• Internal podcasts and live staff radio broadcasts of meetings have cut down the need to attend meetings and briefings in person.
• Christian Aid decomissioned the line of business system they used to run their multi-million pound grant programme.  They are now managing the process from an application built in SharePoint, saving money on licence fees and maintenance agreements.
• Vendor management is important: always make an effort to understand the road map of your vendor.  Christian Aid make great efforts to be a global reference site for Microsoft and in return they have worked with us to meet our requirements.
• They encourage staff to use Facebook, and to set up Facebook groups with each other.  There are lots of Facebook links around the Christian Aid intranet.
• They kept customisation to an absolute minimum (five minor customisations) in order to make the upgrade path as simple as possible. 

CONCLUSIONS FROM THE DAY  Adrian Dale (Senior Advisor, TFPL)

The speakers have shown the many applications of MOSS 2007 including its uses:

• as a communications tool
• as a document repository
• as a collaboration environment
• for alerting people to new documentation or news of interest to them
• an applications platform:  strip out other systems, reduce number of systems by developing new applications within SharePoint rather than bringing in new systems

Connecting people to people is just as important as connecting people to information. For a lot of organisations 'people finder' is the  killer application of the SharePoint suite:  it is effectively an out of the box people directory. 

For the first time collaborative software looks like becoming a standard part of everyone's desktop. 

Very heavy document centric processes still need industrial strength document management systems. Pharmaceutical, Legal, and some parts of government all continue to need these.  But a great many other organizations may find that most of their knowledge workers do not want or need this strength of system, and can get along better with a well managed SharePoint environment.