Because of today's regulatory requirements, firms must pay more attention to the unstructured business information and records broadly referred to as electronically stored information, or ESI, which include e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, images, records of telephone conversations, and instant messages. Operational risk management, legal compliance, and ease of discovery using role-based permissions have become key business imperatives.
Some of the challenges of document management include the difficulty of handling unstructured data; information overload and data sprawl in day-to-day operations; and disparate retention schedules for paper, electronic, and systems data. These challenges put an increased focus on the management of business information and the maintenance of business records.
Microsoft and partner-led enterprise content management solutions help by integrating the applications and tools already familiar to users. Built on the Microsoft Office suite of productivity tools, these solutions are easily integrated into an organization's workflow and readily adopted by users as part of their daily activities. This results in less training time for users, a reduced burden on implementers, and a system that is extensible and flexible enough to accommodate future content and media types, retention and storage requirements, and compliance, legal, and audit requirements.
The document and records compliance solution is based on the Microsoft Office system with products that incorporate native compliance and retention features, records repository and search functionality, managed folder provisioning, transport rules, and journaling.