Audited Events in Office 365 strengthen basic RM

Some of the IM and compliance folks out there may like to know there is a great searchable list of audited events for #O365, including admin events (link).

From a pragmatic point of view, for basic #recordsmanagement, the fundamentals are:

(1) create the right record at the right time with the right business context metadata,

(2) classify it against the appropriate approved classification scheme (would be great if Microsoft’s new AI team could work on the metadata challenge…),

(3) get a locked snapshot of the record when it’s in an official state*,

(4) secure the records to help prove they haven’t been tampered with,

(5) track the records’ retention times,

(6) dispose of the records properly when the retention timer runs out by transferring, archiving or destroying it, and

(7) audit the records as much as you can along the way.

Of course there are many nuances to this, and that is why IM and RM are a professional discipline.  But for most small and medium sized business, in low compliance environments, this is how to get started on the path to a bronze or silver standard of business #RM.  You don’t really need to purchase complex technology tools, you just need some simple processes to tie together some basic functionality into a big picture.  If you’re going for gold or platinum standard of #RM in high compliance environments that’s when you’d want to throw more 3rd party tech into the mix.

Overall it’s nice to see the audit and tracking pieces getting built right into the day-to-day experience by Microsoft in the cloud.  This used to be a significant on-premises database/infrastructure challenge in the not too distant past!

*This is where 21st century eRecords really differ from classic 20th century paper records, and theoretical purists may want to debate.  But think of the old paper forms with multi-coloured triplicates.  We didn’t invest lots of resources into managing all the copies, post it notes, etc. in an active business file.  Rather we focused the more expensive RM controls on the official version of the form.