After a year spent deploying a new SharePoint collaborative environment, the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department (AGD) is asking whether it should look beyond its existing TRIM platform for records management. A major tender has been called to discover potential alternatives.

The tender documents show the A-G’s Department nailing its flag firmly to the SharePoint mast, however an upgrade from its existing TRIM 6 deployment to TRIM 7 has not been ruled out.

According to the tender documents, the AGD has “has established a Microsoft SharePoint environment to support a wide range of business applications, including replatforming the corporate intranet and internet sites and development of selected workflow applications.

“SharePoint has also provided the platform for a learning / demonstration environment, the Virtual Showroom, which has allowed business areas and staff to trial and experiment with team sites, My Sites, a knowledgebase wiki, blogs and other SharePoint capabilities.”

It says the AGD is moving progressively toward the minimisation and long-term elimination of paper files and documents in favour of fully managed electronic documents.  AGD also wants a greater capacity to share information and to support collaboration, both internally and externally, through electronic channels.

“This is consistent with both Government policy (Government 2.0) and AGD strategic directions for information management.”

The AGD has selected SharePoint 2010 as the systems platform for these changes.

“It is planned to eventually replace current shared and personal directories with SharePoint libraries and My Sites, and for SharePoint to become the primary user interface for document management functions.  At the same time, the transition from paper files to electronic documents will be supported.”

The transition to SharePoint implementation is scheduled to take place during 2011-12.

According to the tender documents, “AGD recognises that SharePoint 2010 does not natively support compliance with Commonwealth records management requirements.  AGD records are currently managed with TRIM, through a discrete user interface which users must “drive” for records management functions.

“AGD plans to move to a SharePoint / records management environment in which:
records management functions are transparently and seamlessly integrated with SharePoint 2010 functions; records management requirements impose a minimal overhead on or are invisible to business users; file plans or other frameworks necessary for records management purposes are configured as part of SharePoint site / application design; and staff are able to meet their records management obligations by simply using SharePoint sites as designed and implemented.

“To achieve this, AGD expects to increase the current level of automation of records management processes “behind the scenes”, for example by using rules based processes or configuration to associate record containers with  a business classification schema and AFDA and AGD-specific disposal classes; automating metadata capture; and/or setting up inheritance frameworks for default values.

AGD currently has approximately 1700 staff, situated mainly in Barton, ACT.  Additional staff are located in Canberra and key sites at Mt Macedon, Victoria and in the Sydney CBD.

“In 2003 AGD implemented TRIM as its records management system. The current TRIM version is 6.2.4. It provides both “front end” document management and “‘back end” records management functionality, including Federal Government - compliant security classification, tracking, retention and disposal for both electronic and paper records.

“The TRIM system currently accommodates over 5 million electronic records, primarily in Microsoft Office formats and particularly Word.  More than 500,000 electronic records are likely to be registered to TRIM in 2011.  The current rate of creation and capture of electronic documents into the system is approximately 1.5 gigabytes per day.

“There are also more than 230,000 physical (paper) files managed through TRIM and a relatively high rate of physical file creation, particularly for national security rated material.
A number of disparate record repositories, such as shared directories and specialised business systems, also exist in the current environment.

“There are user perceptions of difficulties in using the current records management system, in particular searching and retrieving documents with precision results. Current search engines do not search across a number of repositories simultaneously, but need to be accessed and utilised individually to source information.

“There are 32 websites in the AGD environment, mostly external facing. These websites create and capture content which is not currently managed in the records system. Retired websites are archived manually and are not easily ‘rehydrated’ for FOI or other legislative requirements.”