Governance: a mandate for the data-driven enterprise

Governance at the SharePoint user level

Although many organizations benefit from an enterprisewide solution for governance, covering all data and all processes is not always necessary or possible. Some organizations can focus on a subset of their information such as email and documents. Colligo provides capabilities through its Colligo Engage platform that can support policies for SharePoint and Office 365 content.

The College of Dental Surgeons of British Columbia (CDSBC), which is charged with maintaining a registry of dental professionals that keeps track of their status and complaints filed against them, wanted to store its emails and scanned documents in SharePoint. However, the CDSBC did not have a way to do this that would allow them to manage metadata needed to organize and retrieve the emails.

The CDSBC used Colligo’s Email Manager for Outlook application to allow users to save emails and attachments from the Microsoft Outlook environment directly into SharePoint, and to add metadata from a dropdown list of options. Users select just those emails that are needed to maintain corporate records so that non-essential messages do not add to the volume of content that is stored.

Governance is controlled centrally, ensuring consistency. “Administrators can go into the Colligo Console and set up policies that apply in general or to a specific group of users,” says Riyaz Lakhani, director of professional services and support at Colligo. “In contrast, SharePoint does not provide such control at the individual client level.” Colligo also can control what actions an individual is authorized to carry out, such as view, print or save a file for offline use.

Another dimension of data governance that Colligo Engage supports is to sync other content repositories. “Some organizations use it for their sales staff to ensure their employees have up-to-date prices that are maintained in SharePoint,” Lakhani says. “Also, these days many organizations use multiple applications for records management and document management, and users may want to access data using a single application that is sourced from multiple repositories. Colligo’s software manages the synchronization from each repository into Colligo client applications while ensuring that each user only accesses the appropriate content, managed centrally using Colligo Console.”

Mobile devices have presented particular challenges to governance of data. Colligo Engage provides access through its Colligo Briefcase. Users can view, edit, sync, tag, find and share information under policies set centrally. This product ensures that governance of corporate content is extended to mobile devices, including Windows, Mac and Android devices.