Digital preservation in sharepoint environment

Question

I'm responsible for a corporate archives with a mandate to retain certain classes of records permanently. Since our organization uses Sharepoint for content and project management, I've been using the Sharepoint Record Center as the final repository for most of these records. I generally convert files I receive to PDF-A (if it makes sense for the file format), add some descriptive metadata based around the records content type, and upload. Multimedia files (images, video, audio files) are stored in a commercial DAM solution with descriptive metadata as well as extracted technical metadata.

I'm concerned that in the long term this will be inadeqeuate and wondering what steps I can take to insure permanency of these records. My organization will not support any open-source solutions which seems to be where most development in the area of digital presevation is happening.

Answer 1

You may want to keep an eye on Preservica if you're looking for a separate piece of software for digital preservation.  They've started working on scripts to integrate/automate moving between content management platforms and Preservica ingest.  They haven't released anything for SharePoint yet, but I know it's on their list.  And the fact that it's a commercial product that comes configured out-of-the-box may make it an easier sell to the powers that be.  Additionally, you could take a look at some compliance software suites, since they focus on bit-level preservation and allow for legal discovery (they don't have the best access tools, however).

Comments

Tessella just released 5.2 which supposedly handles SharePoint. http://preservica.com/press-releases/new-version-5-2/

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Oh, look at that!  Thanks for sharing the link!  Also, as an update/addendum to my answer, Preservica does a lot of free webinars/demos so that you can take a look at some of these new features in action.

Answer 2

We did indeed release support for Sharepoint in Preservica v5.2 and there is more Sharepoint functionality coming soon in v5.3.

Have a look at our recorded demo http://preservica.com/resource/sharepointwebinar/

 

Martin Springell, Preservica