Every organisation has a records management strategy. Regardless of whether they make that strategy explicit in a strategy document, it is implicit in the choices they make about applying retention rules to the content in their business applications. An organization might be seeking to:
It is clear from the way that the Microsoft (Office) 365 cloud suite has been set up that Microsoft has adopted an ‘in place’ approach to records management. In the MS 365 suite no one application is superior for records management purposes than any other. Retention functionality sits in the Compliance centre, outside of any one application. Retention rules can be set in the Compliance centre and applied to any type of aggregation in any of the collaboration/document management/messaging/filesharing applications within the suite.
In the early years of Office 365 it may have been possible for an organisation to deploy the suite while continuing with a strategy of moving all documents and messages needed as records into one specific business application that was optimised for recordkeeping. Since the coming of MS Teams this no longer appears possible.
MS Teams deployed as an organisation’s primary collaboration system
The phenomenal rise in adoption of MS Teams over the past two years is prompting some fundamental changes in the records management strategies of those organisations who have adopted it as their primary collaboration application. Prior to MS Teams:
The impact of MS Teams on an organisation’s records management strategy
Let us think of how the records management strategy of a typical large organisation may have evolved over the past two decades:
The main element of continuity is that the organisation is still encouraging staff to contribute every document or message needed as a record to one particular application. They are still making a distinction between:
When the organisation implemented an EDRM or SharePoint as its corporate document management system and asked staff to move any documents and messages needed as a record into that system, they could argue that they were taking a ‘records management by design’ approach. They endeavoured to configure their corporate document management systems with a logical structure that reflectsed (as best they could) their business processes and to which they attempted to link appropriate retention rules and access rules.
They could justify the routine deletion of content in other applications by arguing that the records management by design approach relies on important documents and messages being placed into an application that has records management frameworks configured into it.
The access model in MS Teams
SharePoint is a document management system. The access model for SharePoint sites and document libraries is flexible. You can make the site/library a silo if you wish by restricting access to a small number of people, but equally you can open up access widely. You can reduce the risk of opening access widely by confining the right to contribute, edit and delete content to a small group while opening view access to a wider group.
MS Teams is a messaging system first and foremost with a document management component (provided by SharePoint) as a secondary element.
You can only view content in a given Team if you are a member of that Team. Each Team member has access to every channel within the team (apart from private channels) and to the Team’s document library. Each Team member can contribute posts to channels and can add and delete items from the document library. Broadening the membership of a Team is therefore more risky than opening up access to a document library in a SharePoint implementation, because everyone that you make a member of the Team has full edit and contribute rights in the Team.
A further disincentive to adding extra members to the Team lies in the fact that by making someone a member of the Team you are exposing the individual to the flow of messages in and out of the channels of that Team. There is a catch-22 here. The more you widen membership of a Team the more you drive message traffic away from Teams channels and into Teams Chat. This is because the wider the membership the greater the likelihood that any given message will be uninteresting, irrelevant or inappropriate for some members. If you keep the membership small you may increase the percentage of traffic going through the channel but you decrease the number of people to whom that traffic is accessible.
- Try to move documents and messages needed as a record into one business application that is optimised for recordkeeping;
- Intervene in several, most or all of their business applications so that each of these applications are optimised to manage their own records;
- Manage records ‘in place’ within the native applications that they arise in, even when an application has a structure and a metadata schema that is sub-optimal for recordkeeping.
It is clear from the way that the Microsoft (Office) 365 cloud suite has been set up that Microsoft has adopted an ‘in place’ approach to records management. In the MS 365 suite no one application is superior for records management purposes than any other. Retention functionality sits in the Compliance centre, outside of any one application. Retention rules can be set in the Compliance centre and applied to any type of aggregation in any of the collaboration/document management/messaging/filesharing applications within the suite.
In the early years of Office 365 it may have been possible for an organisation to deploy the suite while continuing with a strategy of moving all documents and messages needed as records into one specific business application that was optimised for recordkeeping. Since the coming of MS Teams this no longer appears possible.
MS Teams deployed as an organisation’s primary collaboration system
The phenomenal rise in adoption of MS Teams over the past two years is prompting some fundamental changes in the records management strategies of those organisations who have adopted it as their primary collaboration application. Prior to MS Teams:
- An organisation was able, if it so wished, to configure its main collaboration system with a records management friendly structure and metadata schema. This kind of ‘records management by design’ is not possible in MS Teams;
- Most large organisations tended to deploy a document management application as their main collaboration system. Microsoft Teams is a messaging application. The organisation has therefore gone from trying to manage messages in a document management application, to trying to manage documents in a messaging tool.
The impact of MS Teams on an organisation’s records management strategy
Let us think of how the records management strategy of a typical large organisation may have evolved over the past two decades:
- In the early 2000s they may have implemented a corporate electronic document and records management system (EDRMS) and told their staff ‘if you want a document or a message to be treated as a record, save it into our EDRMS’.
- In the early 2010s they may have wanted to introduce a document management system that is more collaborative in nature, such as Microsoft SharePoint. They might have said to their staff ‘if you want a document or message to be treated as a record, move it into a SharePoint document library’.
- in 2019 or 2020 they may have rolled out Microsoft Teams, giving every individual a Teams Chat client and every team a Microsoft Team with a set of channels into which messages and documents can be posted. They may now say to their staff ‘if you have an important document or message, post it through a Team channel’.
The main element of continuity is that the organisation is still encouraging staff to contribute every document or message needed as a record to one particular application. They are still making a distinction between:
- an application that they designate as being a record system (and hence will apply their retention principles and retention rules to);
- other applications that they do not regard as record systems (and hence do not commit to apply their retention principles and rules to).
When the organisation implemented an EDRM or SharePoint as its corporate document management system and asked staff to move any documents and messages needed as a record into that system, they could argue that they were taking a ‘records management by design’ approach. They endeavoured to configure their corporate document management systems with a logical structure that reflectsed (as best they could) their business processes and to which they attempted to link appropriate retention rules and access rules.
They could justify the routine deletion of content in other applications by arguing that the records management by design approach relies on important documents and messages being placed into an application that has records management frameworks configured into it.
The access model in MS Teams
SharePoint is a document management system. The access model for SharePoint sites and document libraries is flexible. You can make the site/library a silo if you wish by restricting access to a small number of people, but equally you can open up access widely. You can reduce the risk of opening access widely by confining the right to contribute, edit and delete content to a small group while opening view access to a wider group.
MS Teams is a messaging system first and foremost with a document management component (provided by SharePoint) as a secondary element.
You can only view content in a given Team if you are a member of that Team. Each Team member has access to every channel within the team (apart from private channels) and to the Team’s document library. Each Team member can contribute posts to channels and can add and delete items from the document library. Broadening the membership of a Team is therefore more risky than opening up access to a document library in a SharePoint implementation, because everyone that you make a member of the Team has full edit and contribute rights in the Team.
A further disincentive to adding extra members to the Team lies in the fact that by making someone a member of the Team you are exposing the individual to the flow of messages in and out of the channels of that Team. There is a catch-22 here. The more you widen membership of a Team the more you drive message traffic away from Teams channels and into Teams Chat. This is because the wider the membership the greater the likelihood that any given message will be uninteresting, irrelevant or inappropriate for some members. If you keep the membership small you may increase the percentage of traffic going through the channel but you decrease the number of people to whom that traffic is accessible.
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