Introduction to ​SharePoint

As a document management platform, SharePoint offers all the major features; like check-in and check-out locking documents for editing, periodic content reviews, content reorganization, automated initialization of workflows, automatic bar-coding, and document identifiers.  SharePoint’s comprehensive eDiscovery and search services allow bulk metadata application, application of retention rules to sets, folders, and sites.  Search functionality has been rewritten to work like a clone of FAST Search providing all but the most specialized search functions (spatial, geo-fencing) returning unified, security trimmed results. SharePoint excels at file organizing, tracking, and sharing.  Retention policies are easily translated to SharePoint library or site configurations.  These capabilities require that the documents reside within the SharePoint repository. ​

It is one of the few document management systems designed as a web first solution. Its deceptively simple default state is designed to be leveraged by third-party add-ons, plug-ins, and services through utilizing SharePoint Web Parts and REST API.

With 160 million users and over 75,000 customer organizations to date, SharePoint provides a different type of out-of-box experience. It provides a lighter, slimmer feature set, focused on the basic requirements of a document management system. 

​SyTech has worked with SharePoint since 2001 and wrote the California framework for delivering mass, high-volume document scanning in Microsoft SharePoint Online.

SharePoint Strengths

• Large Support Community
• Highly Integrated with Office / Office 365
• Powerful and Easy to Use Search Functionality
• More User-Friendly than more Complex Document Management Platforms
• Folder Processing & Taxonomy Workflows
• Advanced Audit Features
• Integrated Workflows
• Rich REST API

​SharePoint Overview​

SharePoint Online is officially classified as a hosted content management and collaboration platform.  While Microsoft works to keep feature parity between SharePoint Online and SharePoint on-premise, there are some distinct differences that benefit SharePoint Online for use as an ERMS platform. 

An Electronic Records Management System (ERMS) provides for management of electronic record life-cycles including storage, search, sharing, retention, permissions, versioning, auditing, and reporting. 

All these functions are available as features in SharePoint Online and are relatively easy to configure when compared with other single-purpose ERMS platforms. 

​Extensibility, a function that is not readily available in most single-purpose ERMS systems comes built in making SharePoint Online the best solution for management of enterprise and/or institutional documents.
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​SharePoint Components

SharePoint includes several core components critical to the design of an ERMS running on SharePoint:
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• SharePoint Environment/ Organization
• Site Collections
• Sites
• Libraries / Lists

​SharePoint Considerations

SharePoint Online has been optimized to run on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.  This allows for massive scalability over locally installed instances of SharePoint.  For example, files saved to SharePoint Online are chunked, encrypted, and stored in Azure Blob Storage instead of writing to the SQL database as blob data.  This allows for cheaper scaling when compared to previous version of SharePoint. 

Click here to read about the limits that impact SharePoint online as of 8/12/2020

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Advanced ​Search

SharePoint provides advanced search capabilities based on a users access rights. Users can only search for files for which they have permissions to access.

There are two ways a user can search for files within SharePoint:

Enterprise Level

• The Enterprise Level search will search for files across all libraries in the system using the metadata typed in the search bar at the top of the screen on the dashboard. This will pull all files you have access to in the system that match the metadata used in the search. 

Library Level

• ​The Library Level search will search for files within a specific library. Open the library you’d like to search, then either type the metadata attached to the file in the search bar at the top of the screen or scroll through the list of files that have been loaded into the library to find the file you are looking for. 

​Share Records

Files stored in SharePoint can be shared from within their library. Sharing files has never been easier! Using the built-in sharing feature users can utilize their action bar to enter the recipient's e-mail address(es) to send the recipient an email with a link to the document. 

Users can also share a link provided by the system, and use that link to copy/paste into a personalized email. 

Depending on the type of file, the link settings may be adjusted to specify who the link works for, and whether the link will allow editing.

NOTE: Only those with permissions can access shared links, the ability to adjust these settings depends on the users permissions.