Complete Control: Microsoft SharePoint + NextPage

In today’s unfriendly legal climate, the astonishing rise in the power of laptop and desktop computers has created an unprecedented level of information risk. For example, over 7.5 billion Office documents are created annually, 80% of which are stored at the “edge” of the organization—on hard drives and scattered shared drives. The associated business costs and risks are important, complex and top of mind for a broad range of organizations. They include:
The high costs of eDiscovery
Legal and regulatory risk associated with uncontrolled information
Low compliance with contractually required safe handling of electronic information

A first step to solving these problems involves publishing and consistently enforcing document retention and disposition policies. Unfortunately, document policy compliance is abysmally low in most firms because user behavior is so difficult to dictate—especially in firms where business is primarily conducted using individually controlled laptops and desktops.

Even if your enterprise is deploying or has deployed a centralized system of record, compliance with policies such as routine disposition may be problematic. The purpose of this guide is to help you understand how Microsoft SharePoint and NextPage can work together to address these types of challenges.

Your Organization’s Need Profile

As a first step in your evaluation, you should decide whether the following need scenarios are important to your business. They were selected to help determine whether a centralized repository such as SharePoint is adequate for controlling information risk in your business. If it is not, you should consider implementing a tracking system such as NextPage.

Some of the relevant questions are summarized in the table below and discussed in the “Complete Control: Microsoft SharePoint + NextPage” section of this document.

Need scenarioSharePoint OnlySharePoint + nextpage
Edge Collaboration. Does document collaboration that takes place on users’ individual machines outside the control of SharePoint — constitute a significant information risk for your organization?SharePoint has no awareness of document collaboration that takes place outside the centralized system.NextPage tracks every version and copy of a document inside or outside SharePoint. It can distinguish between documents that are managed partly in SharePoint and those that are not.
Submission of Records. How important is it for your organization to know that document archiving and disposal processes are taking place?If a document is created outside of SharePoint, the Microsoft Office system does not remind the user to upload it into SharePoint.The NextPage platform can facilitate a range of policy-based behaviors that cause documents to migrate into SharePoint by classification.
Short-term Disposition. How motivated is your firm to routinely dispose of content on the “edge” of your organization that does not need to be archived or retained, in order to render it non-discoverable?SharePoint does not destroy content that exists outside the system.The NextPage platform can produce a range of policy-based behaviors that cause short-term disposition of non-records, whether inside or outside of SharePoint.
Monitoring. How important is it for your organization to know that document archiving and disposal processes are taking place?SharePoint does not monitor compliance outside the system.The NextPage platform makes it easy to monitor document activity and policy compliance across SharePoint, email, fixed drives and removable drives.
Control Plus Sharepoint
SharePoint is quickly becoming an enterprise standard. NextPage extends control and policy application to SharePoint and the desktop.
Analyst WhitePaper
"Without control, corporations will continue to save all data forever, lose intellectual property, and risk the inability to locate and preserve electronic evidence. NextPage provides a solution to help address this exact problem."
~Brian Babineau, Senior Analyst ESG