Wisdom Product Suite > Wisdom and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is set to capture a significant part of the global ECM market. It has rich feature enhancements in almost every area over its predecessor, and some functionality that was previously entirely absent. 

ECM can be defined as a collection of application modules that collectively provides functionality to create, collaborate on, route, publish, find and manage unstructured content. An ECM suite would typically comprise:

• Document management
• Records management
• Workflow / business process management
• Forms
• Search
• Web content management
• Imaging
• Business intelligence
• Portal
• Collaboration

MOSS has outstanding capabilities in document management, portal and collaboration, but typically requires the addition of third party applications or components to achieve world class functionality in the rest. Its records management component, the Records Center, is fine for rudimentary compliance with a small to medium number of documents, but not for the rigorous demands of the UK Public Sector, for either compliance or efficiency.

MOSS, as well as being a solution to many requirements out of the box, however, is a platform on which to build more complex business applications. The Records Center is “pluggable”; it is designed to be replaced by a more comprehensive records management solution without the need for custom development. In this way, the requirements of different geographies and vertical markets can be catered for within the familiar Microsoft Office environment. Morse’s eDRM application, Wisdom, is one such solution, designed specifically for and certified by the UK Public Sector.

This document covers the areas in which Wisdom extends and integrates with MOSS. It is important to understand that the integration is entirely seamless - at no time does the user realise they are using anything other than MOSS when working with documents and records.

Wisdom Records Center:

Fileplan
The MOSS Records Center does not have a hierarchical fileplan. This is a fundamental requirement of The National Archives (TNA), MoReq and the forthcoming MoReq2 compliance standards.

The Wisdom Records Center provides a defineable hierarchical fileplan that can incorporate taxonomies such as IPSV, comprising a class/sub-class/folder/document structure. It has a range of operations at all levels. Items may be multi-homed, so they can be logically accessed from many places, while physically existing only once. The fileplan can also be easily integrated with other line of business solutions, extending the structured data managed by them to seamlessly incorporate managed unstructured content.

Metadata
Both MOSS and Wisdom have a wide range of metadata types. In MOSS, however, metadata can only be applied to documents. In Wisdom, it can also be applied to classes and folders, making content management far less onerous, as properties common to all subordinate items need only be applied once. This also allows users to search for classes and folders by their properties.

Wisdom permits the cascading of metadata, with business rules that control how updates are applied, again simplifying the management of large volumes of data and obviating the repetitive tasks involved in separately managing each document and record.

Retention policies
Wisdom has definable multi-step retention policies that can be applied to any level in the fileplan. Reviews can be driven by internal events such as time after content creation and time since folder activity, and external events notified by other systems.

Because policies can be applied at any level, this again saves considerable effort over having to review individual documents. If a folder has 100 documents, for example, their review and disposal in Wisdom would require 1 action; in MOSS it would take 100 separate actions.

Wisdom also has the ability to manage retention conflicts that may arise, avoiding the accidental disposal of content that should be retained.

Indexing and declaration
Wisdom allows content indexing to be deferred and allocated to a records manager. This means that mandatory metatada that may not be known by the content creator can be set on content types, making the records management solution invisible to users. Indexing tasks are placed in a queue, and content can only be finalised when they have been completed.

Security
In addition to the access control list based security found in MOSS and Windows file systems, Wisdom adds hierarchical and non-hierarchical systems. Hierarchical markings allow organisations to create any number of ranked lists, and if content is marked as such, users must have at least that level of clearance to access it. Non-hierarchical markings allow keywords to be used that must correspond to those in users’ profiles. The security systems in Wisdom are cumulative, and may be applied at any level in the fileplan for ease of administration.

The security in Wisdom is active directory based, but may also be based on Wisdom teams, for organisations whose active directory is not sufficiently evolved for this purpose.

Content types
While both Wisdom and MOSS support content types, in Wisdom security policies can be applied to them, ensuring the appropriate access control is applied to specific content, wherever it is stored.

Audit
Every event in Wisdom is audited, from browsing a folder upwards. Wisdom also features comprehensive search and reporting on the audit data, so it is easy to discover who has done what to groups of content, and conversely what actions individuals have performed on all content.

As well as recording actions on content, Wisdom audits administration and policy changes, so it is possible to discover, for example, what security policy was applied to a specific content item on a particular date and who executed changes in policy.

Hold
MOSS can only apply holds to the retention policies of individual records. Wisdom applies holds on folders, greatly simplifying administration when this is required.

Physical records
Wisdom has extensive paper registry management capabilities. Paper records can be managed in exactly the same way as electronic records, including search, security, checkout, classification and retention. Users can request copies of paper files and for organisations with large paper registries, Wisdom will create a picking list to efficiently locate the required files.

Wisdom MOSS Integration:

Records centre
Wisdom replaces the MOSS Records Center, providing users with full, but controlled access to Wisdom’s fileplan. Using SharePoint designer, team sites can be created for different file plan divisions, so custom branding can be easily applied to each part. Navigation can also be customised in the same way, often reducing the number of steps taken to perform repetitive tasks without the need for bespoke development.

Document libraries
MOSS document libraries are extended, allowing users to send documents to Wisdom from the document menu or using a workflow. The correct location in the fileplan, which can be optionally overridden, is automatically suggested based on the team site template used. Once a document is in Wisdom, users continue to access it from the MOSS document library, but the menu changes to show Wisdom, rather than MOSS options. This allows people to work with content throughout its lifecycle without ever being aware that it has being held under the appropriate policies in the corporate fileplan. Small overlays on the document icon indicate when files are in MOSS, documents in Wisdom or records in Wisdom.

Search
The Wisdom Records Center can be searched from MOSS, with the results security trimmed according to the authenticated user’s permissions. Because Wisdom’s security model is more granular than that of MOSS or Windows file systems, this provides many additional options for content discovery and allows for both informative and secretive searching. A Freedom of Information Officer, for example, could easily discover all content relating to a request, including those items that they did not have permissions to open. They would then be able to request permission from the business owner of that content to disclose or withhold it.

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