ECM Talk 011 - Is SharePoint a records management system?

In this podcast Brad Teed (CTO of GimmalSoft) and James Lappin discuss whether or not SharePoint can be regarded as a records management system.  

Brad says that it can be regarded as a records management system with the caveat that it may not do things in the way that traditional records management systems do them.   James concedes that SharePoint 2010 has records management features (such as holding and applying retention rules, holding a hierarchical classification, locking documents down as records) but feels that these features are not brought together in a coherent enough way to justify calling SharePoint a records management 'system'.

SharePoint 2010 offers organisations two different approaches to records management - the in-place approach and the records centre approach. Brad and James describe and critique  these two different approaches .   James characterises the choice between them as being like that between 'a rock and a hard place'.

Brad describes the challenge of managing the routing rules necessary to get documents from SharePoint team sites to the record centre. James describes the problem of in-place records management which leaves records scattered around team sites under the control of local site owners without providing any reporting capability to give a records manager visibility over them all.

Brad and James will be debating the issue of records management in SharePoint live at the SharePoint Symposium in Washington on 2 November 2011