Understanding OneDrives – for records managers

OneDrive is a standard feature in Microsoft 365 licences. OneDrives: Provide a 'personal' space to store content, with up to 1 TB of storage, that cannot be accessed by anyone except the relevant admins (no different from their previous ability to access 'personal' or 'home ' drives). Can be accessed by end-users directly from File …

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Managing SharePoint legacy

SharePoint is over 20 years old and so it's not surprising that various legacy elements continue to float about or get created, even in SharePoint Online. Legacy elements in SharePoint can be both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that some core elements haven't changed (or changed much) in a very long time …

Observations on ‘Move To’ in SharePoint Online

The following are observations from using the 'Move To' function in a SharePoint Online library to move close to 18,500 files and folders over a weekend, from a 'classic' SharePoint subsite in a SharePoint Online site to a new and 'free standing' site in the same tenant. The moving was completed over a weekend to …

Understanding why SharePoint viewers vanish when documents are moved

Recordkeeping requires the capture and retention of event or process metadata about records; that is, data about who did what and when. This information is usually captured in audit logs or trails. In legacy EDRM systems, event metadata was captured with all other metadata about the record in the system's database; the actual digital object …

Audit trails for records in SharePoint Online

As evidence of business activities, records should be authoritative. According to ISO 15489:2016, the characteristics that define authoritative records are authenticity, reliability, integrity and usability. These characteristics may be met by either: Securing or locking a record to prevent unauthorised changes ('declaring a record'). Recording the details of any events - the 'event history' - …

Avoid using folders to aggregate records in SharePoint

Folders provide a simple way to group content on network file shares. But, while they may look the same in SharePoint (or in a synced library in Windows File Explorer), and are the default way to group content in Teams-linked SharePoint sites, they are not always the best way to aggregate let alone manage digital …

Sync vs Add Shortcut to OneDrive from SharePoint

UPDATE 30 June 2022: Based on feedback and some live troubleshooting with MacOS users, I have changed the text to read MacOS instead of iOS. Also, one MacOS user noted that if there are problems with the sync on those devices, it is sometimes easier just to delete the app and re-install it. Microsoft 365 …

How records managers can manage retention labels and policies in Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 includes the capability, subject to licencing, to apply retention labels and non-label retention policies to content stored in Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint Online sites, Microsoft 365 Groups and OneDrive for Business accounts. Non-label retention policies may also be applied to Teams chats, Teams channel (including private channel) posts, and Yammer messages. For Teams chats …

Combining metadata with folders in SharePoint

As organisations increasingly move content from network file shares to SharePoint, many have found that folders in SharePoint (and via the Files tab in Teams channels) are a bit less friendly. For example, there is no way to 'expand' the folder view, so it is not possible to see the folder hierarchy (unless the library …

Metadata in old film rolls from Japan – a personal story

Metadata is often thought of as either describing objects (e.g., paper or digital records, library books, physical assets, etc), or forming part of a digital object (e.g., system generated metadata or in the case of most digital photographs, EXIF metadata). Before the arrival of computer-based databases (and even after), many companies embedded codes in their …