Autonomy Brings Governance to SharePoint
Autonomy Brings Governance to SharePoint
October 21, 2008: Autonomy is looking to add the missing link to SharePoint with its new ControlPoint information governance solution.
ControlPoint promises to enable realtime, policy-driven control of all SharePoint content, in alignment with evolving corporate, legal or regulatory standards.
Some of the tasks it handles include classification, preservation or disposition of information assets, using its ability to “understand” the meaning of information being collaborated across different SharePoint servers and other content repositories.
Autonomy claims that ControlPoint alleviates the need to assign teams of risk managers, legal professionals and compliance officers to manage information risk developing across SharePoint sites.
“It uses a centralised policy hub to enforce governance control across distributed networks, an increasingly critical function given that SharePoint servers are typically siloed throughout the enterprise,” said the company.
Autonomy is addressing what it sees as a failing of SharePoint in content management and collaboration. According to the company, SharePoint only addresses the "productivity" stages of the information lifecycle, with inadequate controls for maintenance and disposition of content.
“It lacks governance functionality including the advanced needs around taxonomy creation or categorisation of documents against a hierarchy, which powers information management policies as well as some necessary records management processes. Applying legal hold policies within SharePoint are cumbersome, as they require manual search and tag methods. Organisations also recognise that they have no centralised control or discovery of the information being published and collaborated in SharePoint servers, which can lead to severe and damaging legal, regulatory or corporate consequences.”
"While many information officers have taken steps to try to protect the company with retention policies, lack of enforcement and a full understanding of the entire corpus of information in the enterprise can undermine any good faith efforts," said Mike Lynch, Autonomy's CEO.
"The scope and breadth of the problem is compounded by the sheer volume of different types of information in an enterprise, hidden across divisions, countries, laptops, and now among rapidly growing MOSS installations. Companies must understand that policy matters. Without the appropriate policy applied, they will create "information anarchy".
“The Autonomy ControlPoint solution effectively automates the consistent application of policy to SharePoint content based on the conceptual understanding of information in all file formats and data types."
With the ability to understand more than 1000 file-types, the new Autonomy solution centrally manages any information asset and applies legal hold and disposition from across different SharePoint servers and other repositories located on a company's WAN.
Customised dashboards provide alerting and transparency to information management processes within MOSS; increases visibility and streamlines governance actions like legal hold and disposition.