The third (and final for this year) SharePoint User Group in Christchurch was jointly presented by Jonathan Stuckey (Microsoft) and Mark Orange (Intergen).

Jonathan started off.

An internal project at Microsoft New Zealand has focused on the compliance requirements faced by New Zealand organizations, especially with the Public Reocrds Act. Phase 1 was discovery, Phase 2 was framework and guidance, and Phase 3 is proof of concept.

Approach to compliance projects: people, process and policy are important, but systems in the middle are critical.

Key point: the mere implementation of a system will not reach compliance signoff. You have to deal with the other components: people, process and policy.

Challenges faced by all systems: how to deal with all of the new content types coming through organizations.

The key to driving user adoption: getting user engagement. Try to give users more when you ask them to change behavior. There is an event next week in New Zealand to launch the framework, see http://www.microsoft.com/nz/events/discovery/pra for registration details.

Jonathan then shifted to a demonstration of PRA compliance in SharePoint, using the Litware demo system. A couple of document libraries were added for PRA, a set of workflow processes, a set of customized views (based on certain metadata fields, eg, documents by Document Type). Workflow processes do things like moving copies of documents into a compliance library.

Questions 1. Can we use SharePoint to manage a document stored in an external content repository? In some cases, yes, depending on the other repository. Eg, TRIM and Meridio offer capabilities in this area.

A more complex situation is the federation of metadata across organizations, where the taxonomy of one firm is different from another firms, but they have to share documents. Are working with a third-party, SchemaLogic, for doing this (see http://www.schemalogic.com).

After a short break, Mark Orange talked about the tech stuff underneath the PRA extensions.

Intergen added capabilities such as custom content types, custom list definitions, event handlers (eg, to prevent attempted deletions, to enforce read only behavior, to set item level permissions, etc.), custom actions, timers, and workflow (the latter does was done by Microsoft).

The work was done using the “Features” capabilities in SharePoint.