DCP Information Management - MOSS
Information Management is provided within DCP by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) - Microsoft's Industry leading collaborative working application.
A high level summary of the functionality is detailed below:-
The maintenance of version histories enables the participating organisations to monitor changes to documents over time and with the associated audit trail it can be seen who made the changes, when they were made and what was actually changed. The facility to check a document out of the central repository for editing purposes ensures that the latest version held in the repository is frozen until the new version of the document is checked in.
Content Approval
Participating organisations have the ability to review and approve documents prior to publishing within the collaborative environment providing a key means of improving quality and efficiency. Notification to the approvers of documents awaiting approval can be achieved through e-mail.
Content & Metadata search
Document metadata (content about a document such as its owner, status etc.) can be used to facilitate searches. The DCP Service provides content categorisation (“taxonomy”) and document metadata to aid content management and searching.
Alerts
Organisations participating in a MOSS community benefit from a notification facility which will enable Users to save time and respond more quickly and efficiently to changes in the content of the repository that affect their work and that of their team. Users can be alerted by e-mail of changes to a specific item of content, all items in a folder, all items assigned to a category, or a set of search results.
Personalised views
Users can customise the defaut pages within MOSS to create personal views of these pages and Lists.
User Controlled Access
The ability of an organisation collaborating using MOSS to control access to owned content will always be essential. For example, there may be some documents that are evolving and that the Owner of these documents does not wish their Trading Partners to see until they are complete. MOSS provides secure access to documents in the central content repository that fulfil these needs with access to the workspace and associated documents being managed by User coordinators using a bespoke tool.
Document level permission
As well as access being applied at workspace level, it is also possible to apply access at document library, folder and even document level.
Personal Site
Each user has their own site (called ‘My Site’) where they can provide a public profile to the other portal users. My Site can become a focus for the individual’s desktop of work and their public face to their Team and Unit. It will allow them to build and employ a virtual environment from which they can create a ‘dashboard’ of the most critical information that they need on a day-to-day basis , share information with others, interact in a social community and connect with people who have the skills they need.
Record Management
Record Management provides features such as Content-Type and policy-based retention and expiration schedules, auditing and reporting against policy based actions and labeling. All of which can be used to ensure that organisations meet their regulatory and legal requirements and manage its corporate knowledge. The Records Repository is the core of the records management function of MOSS. It includes a records vault to ensure integrity of the documents stored within the repository, configurable information management policies and document Hold capabilities that allow coordinators to suspend changes to records during litigation.
Workflow
Within MOSS it is possible to create workflows to automate administrative processes. Thus speeding up the process and reducing the workload on users. For example the Business Document Workflow features allow for document review, approval, signature collection, issue tracking as well as custom routing for each scenario.
Lists
This functionality allows users to replace many simple existing Microsoft Access databases and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and provide browser-based, multi-user data capture. Users can create useful functionality such as task lists, contact lists, links or any custom list specific to their role. Lists can look up information from other lists and present reports and views generated on the data. Calculated fields and pull-down data selection is also available. Customising lists can enable users to devise sophisticated reports. One of the main benefits of the enhanced list functionality is sophisticated integration between MOSS and a range of Microsoft Office products for example it is possible to for a user to synchronise the task and contacts list with Outlook .
Shared Calendars
A collaborative group will need to see at a glance the scheduled events that are relevant to the team. A shared calendar meets this requirement. it is even possible by use of metadata to create various views on these calendars, thus only displaying items relevant to an individual. The functionality allows 2-way synchronization of a users Outlook Calendar withe the Shared Calendar contained within MOSS.
Discussions
Discussions at document and stand alone level will enable teams to exchange ideas and provide feedback on specific subjects. This is often where new insights are generated that are of value to the whole team.
Surveys
Surveys can be used to capture a user communities opinions in a quick effective manner. The survey is available on-line, can be tailored to ask the relevant questions and can be targeted to a specific group of users with the coordinators having access to all responses.
Announcements & Blogs
It will be possible to add to the sense of common purpose of the organisations participating in a MOSS community by providing announcements and information relevant to their collaborative endeavours.
Wikis
Wiki's provide an easy way to use method for capturing knowledge from users, enabling users to quickly and simply build up and maintain a knowledge base on topics of interest.
