Its good to hear that your colleagues like using their SharePoint facility. You are in a very interesting situation having both EDRMS and SharePoint users in the your organisation. Do you notice much of a difference in user feedack from those using EDRM and those using SharePoint?

Microsoft seems in many organisations to be bundling up SharePoint with negotiations over Office and Windows upgrades. I won’t pretend I am comfortable with that. However once an organisation, for whatever reason, has decided to purchase and implement SharePoint then the best thing we can do is to help the organisation take advantage of SharePoint’s strengths and mitigate its weaknesses.

And that means working to get SharePoint simple enough for teams to make sense of and work with, but rich enough for them to derive benefit from it. It also means working to get procedures set tight enough for SharePoint to be governable but flexible enough for colleagues to be able to innovate and be creative with it.

Your point about us being caught like rabbits in the headlights in front of the rise of SharePoint is true. I think as a profession we have now reached the point where we can articulate the weaknesses of SharePoint from a records management point of view, but we need to move on from that to generate and share best practices on managing documents and records in SharePoint, with and without EDRMS.

We really could do with some decent case studies of succesful records management approaches to SharePoint: but they seem as rare as hens teeth at the moment: I didn’t hear of any at the recent RMS conference.

Many of the delegates at the South West RMS are struggling to move forward and control their information. As James rightly points out a fileplan to cover a Local Authority is massive and possibly unworkable in the long term. You would never build a business that looks like a Local Authority. How I would love to work for a simple, single purpose Government Department.

I like to think of our meeting as therapy sessions for the under funded. What seems to be clear is that many IT departments are pushing SharePoint on to people who don’t want it as part of their Microsoft Enterprise agreement.

We the user meanwhile stnd staring in to the headlights like a tartled rabbit, waiting for a viable solution to hit us between the eyes.