Doug Owens
Director of Implementation
How does an organization that purchased SmartForce handle Open Records Requests?
SmartForce™ is built on top of the Microsoft SharePoint platform, so clients have access to the eDiscovery (electronic discovery) process to find, preserve, analyze, and package electronic content for a legal request or investigation.
Is our data safe?
Yes. With Office 365, customers own their own data. Legal requests from any government agency are sent directly to the customer and not handled by Microsoft. Microsoft does not provide any access to anyone. To learn more please visit the Office 365 Trust Center.
Is SharePoint really capable of records management?
Yes. SharePoint has significant records management capabilities right out of the box. In Office 365 there are now 1TB site collections and unlimited size tenants, so it can scale to meet an array of records management needs.
What about legal preservation?
While using eDiscovery Center with SharePoint 2013 or Office 365, users are able to capture relevant records managed within the environment and preserve them by specifying SharePoint sites and enabling In-Place Hold. With In-Place Hold enabled, your users can continue to work on their documents with no impact. eDiscovery Center uses the built in SharePoint search to index and search all SharePoint sites and while on premises you can also index and search file shares. You can place your collections from other systems, such as a user’s local computer in SharePoint or a file share, to search your data in one place. The eDiscovery Center can also search and manage holds for Exchange mailboxes. The eDiscovery Center is a type of site collection, just like a Records Center, and is useful not only for legal preservation of records, but also for beneficial FOIA, FOIL, and PDR (Public Disclosure Requests), because you can easily search and export data.
What is the difference between a document library in The Record Center and In Place Records Management?
In Place Records Management requires users to identify key metadata associated with each created record and preserved within a SharePoint site. In a dynamic and collaborative environment, not all items are considered a record. Rather, only the “finished” product is what’s required to be captured in line with the Corporate Retention Policy and Retention Schedule. In other words, you may be capturing items that are not records when implementing in-place records. In Place Records Management allows you to define records within any collaboration and personal sites when the records will be included with other documents. The Records Center is a single location where you can store and manage all your records.
For electronic records, do you require any approvals before disposition/deletion occurs or does that disposition occur automatically, with no human intervention?
SharePoint allows automatic destruction/disposition. However, it is a desired practice to require approvals and reviews before deletion occurs and the possibility of human oversight.
Are there any compatible metadata extractors for scanned documents?
Yes, but not out of the box. Third party solutions exist and they can be customized to be able to identify metadata fields from unique, scanned images. We recommend that a person validates this information before moving items into the SharePoint Records Center.
How is security handled?
With SharePoint 2013, In-Place Hold is not visible to users, so you can preserve content without people even knowing the data is on hold. Only your eDiscovery users who have access to the eDiscovery Center can see what locations are on hold.
A very valuable resource is this eDiscovery FAQ which you can find here.
Parties interested in the SmartForce™ Agency Management System and how it improves intelligence and community collaboration, click here. After watching the demo video, you are invited to request a free trial of the agency management system to try for yourselves.
