Filers vs Finders – The Challenge of Defining Records
Do you file your critical email in folders or just search for what you need? Filer or finder does not matter until your company decides to clean up its digital landfills. Records management sounds easy at first. Users designate actual business records and some system expires (deletes) non-record communications and loose Office files after an acceptable time for business use. Microsoft introduced Managed Folders for Outlook 2007 to support this exact process. Although they could have replicated the same functionality into normal file shares (directories), they chose to nudge the market to migrate loose content to Sharepoint for many reasons. The entire ‘foldering’ concept is dependent on overburdened users taking the time and effort to make active decisions on every email they send or receive. Many users have given up trying to file email or files into the appropriate folders and instead just rely on Outlook/Windows search (weak) or aftermarket desktop search engines like X1 or ISYS to find items when they need them. So how does a company minimize user (and productivity) impact while implementing a selective retention initiative (i.e. stop keeping everything)?