There is a mindset within records management that “If it’s not complicated, it won’t work”. While establishing a solid records management process is not easy per se, it should not be made more difficult by proprietary vendors who have lost focus or never had a focus on usability. Many tools overcomplicate the storing and finding of records. If a system is not easy to us it will not succeed, no matter the brand name or promises by the vendor.

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During the 2010 AIIM Expo Opening Session, John Mancini – President of AIIM, laid out “8 Disruptive Forces That Will Transform the Content Management Industry”. Referencing Seth Godin’s quote of “When the platform changes, the leaders change”, set the tone for the changing environment content management is rapidly moving towards. Some of the key takeaways are as follows:

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Death and taxes are not the only certain things in life. Within our human existence is the need to classify the world around us. We are always in a state of classification. In speaking about death, we classify the type of death (ex. death by taxation) and in taxes we classify the type of tax (ex. the death tax). To demonstrate a less morbid example, a document can be classified by the department it was created in, such as “Sales”, and the document type, such as “Proposal”.

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Employee: “Can you please tell me the location of our SharePoint document library?”

IT: “Sure, its http://portal.mycompany.com/the%20company%20documents”

Employee: “Oh ya, I remember. I forgot about the weird %20’s in the URL. Can you do something about that?”

If you ever wondered about the mysterious %20 in your SharePoint site path, you are not alone. Users in your organization at this very moment are probably viewing a SharePoint page that contains a %20 in the URL. Unless you consider this a “feature”, there is a direct method for ensuring that %20 does not appear in any SharePoint URLs in the future.

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Have you ever created a site column but when you try to reference it you get this: Have%20you _X007C_ever _X0025_created _X0024_a%20site_X0025_column _X003C_but_X007C_when%20you%20try_X0022_to_X00A3_ reference%20it_X003C_you_X0023_get%20this

The garbled mess above is a perfect example of what to avoid when creating a site column within SharePoint. During the creation process, SharePoint determines an “internal name”. This name cannot be changed and is used for reference and security purposes. As an example, if you create a column named “My Data”, the internal name will be “My_X0020_Data” even if you edit the column later and change it to another value such as “The Best Data Ever”. SharePoint treats the initial value created as the internal name within the database and further changes only affect the display name.

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One of the most overlooked features of SharePoint is its capability to be used as an internet site. Many view SharePoint’s “look” as very constrained and aim to “not make SharePoint look like SharePoint” when creating an internet site. However, by applying custom Master pages and CSS you will be surprised by what you can achieve… and with the release of SharePoint 2010, customization is made easier via increased browser based tweaks, a redefined SharePoint Designer, and the always robust Visual Studio.

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During this morning’s keynote presentation at the SharePointPro 2010 Summit & Expo, Steve Fox (SR. Technical Evangelist for Microsoft) highlighted several key features which demonstrate how SharePoint 2010 is ready for primetime. While this is in no means a comprehensive list, it touches on significant improvements which benefit administrators, developers and the all-important end users:

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Content Classification consists of three primary elements; a Taxonomy, Metadata, and Content Types.  A Taxonomy is a hierarchical classification of terms. Metadata (Site Column or Field) is “data about data” in that it provides context to content, while a Content Type is a collection of Metadata…

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