Appropriately for a body that regulates the vast array of digital content delivered to Australians via broadcasting and broadband, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is stepping up to the challenge of managing its own exploding data use. IDM asked Deputy CIO Stephen Bounds to reflect on a migration to SharePoint 2010 and RecordPoint electronic record-keeping.

The ACMA is a statutory authority within the federal government portfolio of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. It has principal offices in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney and employs approximately 690 people.

SharePoint 2010 was implemented July 2010 and the organisation uses hp TRIM 6.25 to manage electronic and physical recordkeeping. In March 2011 the ACMA commenced a migration to RecordPoint for electronic record-keeping.

“There’s been a strategic shift in direction at the ACMA over the last couple of years to standardise our software platforms and to move towards a more Microsoft-oriented stack,” said Bounds.
On the way it has adopted Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint and a number of other tools, including the use of .NET for software development.

“We wanted to look at the logic in also maintaining hp TRIM as separate platform for record-keeping, because obviously SharePoint has been pushing record-keeping as a feature of their own.
“We made the choice that it would be a strategically appropriate to adopt RecordPoint as a third party enhancement to SharePoint which provides ISO 15489 record-keeping compliance.”

“In 2010 we migrated to SharePoint 2010, Windows 7 and 64-bit servers running SQL 2008 R2. TRIM’s software wasn’t compatible with the latest Microsoft technology at that point and it forced us to hold back on an Exchange 2010 upgrade.

“When TRIM released an update with SharePoint 2010 compatibility, unfortunately you could either have 2010 compatibility or Windows 7 compatibility, not both.  That forced us to stay with TRIM 6.25 instead of 7 until those issues were fixed.

“That was a frustrating period of around 6 months, and during that time we decided, well, we’re not confident that TRIM’s going to continue developing at a pace that we’re comfortable with.  Since it’s not strategically aligned with the rest of our platform, let’s look at what we can do to reduce that dependency.”

RecordPoint has now been deployed in production, although the ACMA chose not to do a mass migration to minimise the immediate impact on internal business processes that are still tied up in the TRIM model.

“While we want to eventually migrate everyone to RecordPoint, more immediately we want to capture records that aren’t being captured or properly managed. Our staff still have a lot of shared drives and use email as a de facto document store.  Initially we think we can improve our overall record-keeping situation and reduce non-compliance with RecordPoint as an additional tool.

“The other strategic reason for choosing RecordPoint was to make SharePoint a suitable document management platform for other business applications. We have an ambitious program to replace many of our current applications using various combinations of bespoke and off the shelf software in the next 2-3 years. 

“All of these projects now have a mandated standard that if you are doing document management and record-keeping of any kind, you must integrate with SharePoint and use RecordPoint as the back-end.

“Having a stack we can easily re-use is a big advantage.  For example, we’ve now enabled RecordPoint on our Enterprise Project Server which means that any time someone uploads a project plan, it automatically gets catalogued and stored on RecordPoint.

“Similarly, we have a project that needs to accept signed statements from our stakeholders endorsing their annual statements of income for licensing fee purposes.  These will also be stored and captured in the RecordPoint system.”

Integration roadmap
With the initial deployment competed in August, the next 12 months will focus on getting RecordPoint bedded down and operationally understood so that new processes can be easily integrated into the overall system.

“We will be working individually with each section of the organisation to identify how they can best use the strengths of SharePoint for their business needs, while still having sites with compliant recordkeeping thanks to RecordPoint,” said Bounds.

“Longer term, we expect TRIM to become a pure archive for physical and electronic records.  At this point only our core records team and team that manage their own paper records will have access to TRIM, no more than 30 to 40 people.  Everyone else will use SharePoint and RecordPoint for their recordkeeping.

“In March 2012, we will re-evaluate whether we have progressed enough to move away from TRIM as a primary corporate recordkeeping tool.  However, it is a complex piece of change management, so I expect this to be a 12-24 month process.”