eTera consulting

The growth of SharePoint has accelerated over the past several years, making it one of the most prolific platforms within the enterprise. It has a wealth of features associated with it, and it can be used in many different ways. In an AIIM Survey, Industry Watch SharePoint – Strategies and Experiences 2010, 78% of the respondents indicated that they have SharePoint in use or have plans to implement it.

This rapid growth and versatility has created a unique set of ESI management and eDiscovery challenges since every SharePoint deployment and structure will be different. As such, the legal, information technology and compliance groups must work together to gain a better understanding of how SharePoint is being used within the enterprise and what risks may be present.

SharePoint Use and Value

To get a better understanding of the challenges, it is worth understanding how it is being used and why is has become so popular. Key to its growth and business value are the following factors:

• SharePoint has a broad range of functionality and flexibility, and encompasses a number of different enterprise data sources and services, including:
  
  • Intranet portals
  • Extranets and websites
  • Document management
  • File management
  • Collaboration spaces
  • Social networking tools
  • Enterprise search
  • Business intelligence tools
  • Workflow, process and information integration
• It is straight-forward to use by the end-user, as well as easy to deploy by the IT group. This ease-of-use often means that it expands beyond initial expectations and becomes a repository for data that was not originally contemplated.
• It is integrated with common business applications and platforms such as Microsoft Exchange and Office. This can mean that eMail data, for example, may now be stored in yet another repository – one that is typically outside of the normal purview of tradition eMail management and archiving platforms. In addition, there are also countless third-party solutions available, as well as integration with cloud-based systems. SharePoint often becomes the container within which other business systems and applications are accessed and used.

SharePoint eDiscovery Challenges

Now, let’s get into what all this means in terms of eDiscovery

While we still see that the most common usage of SharePoint is for Document Libraries, there are many, many more content types available in SharePoint. Most notable are some of the social networking components which are now included, such as wikis, blogs, and discussion groups. There can also be an infinite number of variations and scenarios to consider with custom lists, connected to collaboration tools, connected to custom-developed web parts and workflows, which in turn can be used to access any number of data sources. Almost all of these can be modified and customized by the users themselves, resulting in a highly dynamic platform that can be difficult to get a good picture of from a discovery standpoint.

On top of this, SharePoint also supports multiple versions of the content, and there are several layers of metadata associated with the content that is stored within SharePoint. This means that many more discussions and decisions may need to be made as far as what should be included (or excluded) when presented with a discovery request. For instance, you may only want the latest version of a document or list; or you could make the decision that all versions are potentially important to your case. You could also determine that both the file-level metadata associated with documents, as well as the separate metadata stored in the SharePoint database are equally valuable.  

Further complicating matters is figuring out who is the custodian of the data stored in a SharePoint site? In some cases you may already know that you have to target data for John Smith, but does that mean the documents John Smith created, or does it also mean the ones he has access to? In other cases you may need to try and identify who the custodians are based on the content, such as blogs or wikis they created or posted on.

So, while SharePoint is a great tool and is expanding rapidly, in many ways it creates a whole host of new issues when trying to respond to a discovery request, meet your compliance requirements, or scope a collection. You now have many more facets to consider – both internally as an organization deploying and managing SharePoint; or as outside counsel considering your strategy.

In my next blog post, I will address how you can get a better understanding of your own SharePoint challenges, what risks you might have, and how you would go about gearing up for an eDiscovery effort.

Posted by John Rubens, Managing Director of Corporate Analysis, eTERA Consulting. John can be reached at jrubens@eteraconsulting.com.