REDMOND, Wash. — May 29, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 has received U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) 5015.2 certification. Endorsed by the National Archives and Records Administration, the 5015.2 standard on which the DoD certification is based serves as the benchmark for government and corporate organizations that manage records and documents.
“As government regulations around information management and preservation have increased, many organizations have taken a hard look at their records management practices,” said Jeff Teper, corporate vice president of the Office SharePoint Server Group at Microsoft. “We made enterprise content management a major focus during the development of Office SharePoint Server 2007, and we’re pleased that our customers can now have the confidence of knowing it has been approved through the DoD’s rigorous 5015.2 certification process.”
Microsoft utilized the SharePoint platform in meeting the DoD 5015.2 criteria, integrating Exchange Server 2007 and extending SharePoint Server 2007’s records management capabilities with an add-on pack that will be available free to customers later this year.
“While highly regulated industries such as financial services, utilities and pharmaceuticals have always had records retention requirements, changes in government regulations, such as the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, will have an impact on companies across the board as they realize the need to implement records management to address new electronic discovery requirements,” said Kenneth Chin, research vice president at Gartner Inc. “Gartner recommends that enterprises use the DOD 5015.2 standard as a key requirement when acquiring any records management product, along with consideration of local standards.”
Spanning the Spectrum of Enterprise Content and Records Management Needs
While enterprise content management (ECM) has become a top priority for CEOs and IT executives alike, every industry and organization has unique ECM needs. Microsoft developed Office SharePoint Server 2007 to provide a robust and unified platform that organizations can customize and implement to meet their specific needs. The Microsoft ECM solution provides capabilities to manage the entire life cycle of unstructured content from creation to expiration. These capabilities include document management, records management, Web content management, workflow and forms solutions.
With respect to records management and compliance, Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers the following integrated capabilities:
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Information management and retention enables organizations to control the way content is managed to enforce compliance with corporate, legal or governmental policies. To define information management policies for their sites, organizations can use the following predefined policy features individually or in combination: auditing, bar codes and expiration. They also can develop custom information management policies.
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The Records Center site template is designed to help organizations implement their records management and retention programs. This site template extends standard Office SharePoint Server 2007 features with additional records management capabilities: vault abilities that help ensure the integrity of records stored within the Records Center, records routing, information management policy enforcement, and the ability to add records that are subject to litigation or investigations to a hold list.
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eDiscovery in Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables organizations to streamline the process of document retrieval with integrated search and the placing of records on hold that are subject to litigation or investigation. Records on hold are suspended from records management policies and expiration, ensuring access throughout the litigation process.
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Information Rights Management (IRM) allows organizations to limit the actions that users can take on files that have been downloaded from SharePoint lists or libraries. IRM encrypts the downloaded files and limits the set of users and programs that are allowed to decrypt these files. IRM can also limit the rights of the users who are allowed to read files so they cannot take actions such as printing copies of the files or copying text from them.
More information on records management in Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be found at http://office.microsoft.com/sharepoint.
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