Sustainable Archiving with SharePoint?

SharePoint is popular. The collaboration platform already has more than 135 million users worldwide. SharePoint is also the market leader in the Netherlands. Publications byAIIMandThedmcollaboratorsshow that more than half of all companies use SharePoint as a DMS solution. SharePoint meets the requirements for a good DMS and, through the Records Center, also adds the functionalities needed for sustainable archiving. These include the use of metadata, version control for documents and data, the setting of retention and destruction schedules, and an auditing feature that meticulously tracks changes for verification and accountability.

Furthermore, a SharePoint environment can contain an impressive amount of data and is technically stable: thanks to its scale, any bug in the system is quickly resolved. Finally, the software is also user-friendly: it was developed with the user in mind, and that’s evident. SharePoint therefore technically meets all the requirements for sustainable archiving. Yet the platform has not yet been widely adopted in the archiving world. Why?

SharePoint may be popular, but a large number of organizations that use SharePoint struggle with its implementation. Projects fail, are cut short, or are put on hold. One of the reasons is that SharePoint includes plugins from a large number of vendors. Integrating with non-Microsoft solutions is also not straightforward: most companies need a third party to handle the integration. And that’s not even mentioning the customization many companies require to ensure SharePoint fits well with their business. Here, too, third-party involvement is necessary—and thus requires a budget and a significant investment of time.

The skepticism within the archival community stems primarily from the formal requirements imposed on archival systems. One of the major advantages of SharePoint is that it offers users a great deal of freedom to create and store documents. The downside is that this can lead to a cluttered folder structure. And that, in turn, runs counter to the strict regulations governing the design of archival structures—known as governance. If you plan to use SharePoint for records management, this is therefore a serious consideration.

Although SharePoint has all the necessary features for records management, the software does not comply with Dutch legislation. If your organization is subject to the Archival Act or must comply with ISO and NEN 2082 requirements, this will still require the necessary integrations with other programs. For example, SharePoint does not provide a feature to generate an archive file in PDF/A format in addition to the regular file. To accomplish this, third-party software and assistance are required.

SharePoint databases are hosted in the cloud, and security through the assignment of permissions is poorly managed. And for many IT managers, that says it all. Most want to store sensitive business information in their own environment. It’s a matter of trust that your data is secure and cannot be accessed by anyone. For security reasons, many companies ultimately opt for a hybrid solution, in which dynamic documents remain in SharePoint while static documents are stored in an archiving solution.

SharePoint is a collaboration platform with unprecedented capabilities. However, to make the system suitable for records management in accordance with Dutch laws and regulations, the necessary additional functionalities still need to be created or integrated. In almost all cases, this requires custom development or collaboration with a vendor that has already developed a DMS/RMA within SharePoint. Experience shows that this is quite a challenge for programmers and developers.

SharePoint is certainly a good DMS solution, particularly for smaller organizations that are not subject to strict archiving regulations. The software offers all the necessary features for version control, metadata management, and retention periods. However, for organizations that must comply with laws and regulations and have specific security requirements, SharePoint is not the obvious choice. At its core, SharePoint is not an archiving system, but a collaboration platform with document management capabilities. Customizing SharePoint requires a great deal of effort, time, and money. A hybrid system combining SharePoint with a separate DMS for long-term archiving is therefore more efficient.