Gimmal Information Management Platform

Transcription

1 Gimmal Information Management Platform 1

2 Table of Contents Introduction... 3 Gimmal for User Experience, Information Governance and Compliance... 4 User Experience and Adoption... 5 Governance... 7 Compliance...10 Summary...13 About Us...13 Gimmal 24 Greenway Plaza, Suite 1000 Houston, TX (877) info@gimmal.com Copyright 2015 by Gimmal LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. 2

3 Introduction SharePoint is one of the most widely adopted enterprise information management technologies in use today. It helps organizations collaborate on projects, facilitate internal communication, work with partners and customers, helps employees find information, enables organizations to manage and govern content and serves as a launching point into business applications. Any technology that can support such a vast set of workloads needs to be powerful, flexible and easy to use. SharePoint s ease of use and flexibility is both a blessing and a curse. Almost anyone in an organization can implement SharePoint any way they see fit, with any look and feel, with security or without, with metadata controls or not. As organizations broadly adopt SharePoint, a set of common challenges often manifest: Lack of consistency in SharePoint sites look and feel results in a requirement for training/learning which in turn negatively impacts adoption Users cannot quickly access information or find the right documents Unmanaged or under managed SharePoint sites increase the compliance risk to organizations, with exposure to legal discovery Content is sometimes over-managed, making sharing and collaboration difficult Site content lacks context, making it hard to find User experiences are not compelling, lacking the personalization users require Home-grown solutions have proven to be expensive, are frequently not cloud-ready, which leads to high implementation, maintenance and platform costs To make the most out of an investment in SharePoint, organizations look to third party add-on technology to deal with the challenges of User Experience and Adoption, Governance, Compliance and Business Application Interoperability. Often, organizations looking to overcome these challenges do so by purchasing a collection of point solutions. Gimmal has realized that the ideal in meeting all four of these challenges is to enable organizations through a single platform, not a collection of disparate point solutions. With this understanding Gimmal has created an enterprise-class platform that enables the flexible deployment of SharePoint for enterprise information management. The platform also enables a simplified and controlled transition from on-premises solutions to the Cloud with a Hybrid First approach that allows organizations to take advantage of the connect anywhere, anytime nature of the Cloud and the stringent content control often required by heavily regulated organizations which is provided on-premises. Gimmal s platform for information management not only resolves the four key challenges organizations are trying to overcome, it leverages the full power of SharePoint to drive business solutions. With its ability to connect people, content and processes, the Gimmal platform can align to the role-based use cases that each company supports. By connecting to other business application platforms like SAP, organizations can drive solutions such as invoice processing, employee records management and enterprise asset management entirely through SharePoint. 3

4 Gimmal s Platform for Information Management enabling organizations with innovative software solutions that solve complex information management and business process challenges Gimmal for User Experience, Information Governance and Compliance Content comes into the enterprise in many different forms and is distributed across numerous systems. It exists in their enterprise content management or records systems, in their enterprise resource planning or customer relationship management systems, in their , file systems, intranets, on paper, in a blog or a wiki and in social medial. Content can be anywhere and everywhere. In order to support organizational information management requirements it is important to enable good information governance, and, good information governance must address key steps in a multi-step process. Context or metadata must be applied to the content when it is captured to give the content meaning and purpose to help drive it through a lifecycle. Content can now be leveraged within your organization, connected to users and their roles, business processes and other business systems to extend its value, drive efficiencies and reduce costs. And finally, once content has fulfilled its primary business purpose within the active lifecycle, it can be retained for long-term preservation according to regulations, policies or retention rules, or it can be destroyed once it has lived up to all legal and compliance requirements. The proper management of content is key, but we always have to keep in mind that these systems we put in place to control our vast vaults of corporate information are accessed, administered and maintained by people. In traditional content management solutions, user experience is consistently overlooked as they were originally designed to simply manage content, not connect people and content. Users are best enabled when they work in an environment where they are comfortable and where their role and day-to-day processes are plainly supported. Gimmal s platform for SharePoint incorporates a role-based user experience, extensive governance practices with formal compliance support to provide organizations with an easy to use, well-controlled and automated information management environment. Over the next three sections this paper will define how Gimmal brings these capabilities to enterprise organizations today. 4

5 User Experience and Adoption User Experience can make or break a SharePoint implementation and although widely adopted, research shows that only 11% of organizations are truly happy with SharePoint 1. Of those 89% of organizations who are not satisfied, most outline end-user adoption challenges and that usability never met expectations. Creating a compelling, easy to use, intuitive and consistent experience can take an army of SharePoint developers or application specialists. To ensure adoption, organizations must reduce end-user complexities. Work-in-progress content and archived content must be easy to find and access. In order to achieve success with large intranet and portal implementations they must relate directly to how each individual user does their job. Gimmal products drive consistency and enable a role-based and intuitive user experience that aligns to established work processes. This consistency creates a comfortable experience for users resulting in higher productivity and increased utilization of the platform. The following are capabilities that the Gimmal Platform offers to support extended and enhanced User Experience and Adoption in SharePoint: Gimmal Enhanced Search extends SharePoint search to make it easier for users to find content. Enhanced Search makes use of SharePoint Managed Properties 2 to enable advanced search, filtering, and the inclusion of custom fields in search results. Another way to view this is to think of Enhanced Search data mining the properties of your binary content, or exposing valuable content property information into and through a more intuitive interface. Users can now search for and receive results that can be acted upon, filtered and exported to a file. Gimmal Content Loader provides the ability to configure site document library upload access for importing content with minimal user interaction. This eliminates the need for users to navigate to a location and manually upload files. With Content Loader a user simply selects the content type, fills out the required metadata properties, and then drags the files onto the target, and the operation is complete. This eliminates the requirement for a non-technical end-user to understand the more complex aspects of the SharePoint information architecture. With Content Loader users can easily upload many files and achieve common metadata, reducing errors, increasing ease of use and eliminates mouse clicks and confusion. The Gimmal Web Part Tab Manager helps organize a page display via tabs and provides more controlled access across SharePoint. This minimizes or eliminates the need for vertical scrolling across pages that have many web parts. A page author chooses which web parts are displayed on a given tab. The tabbed interface can be oriented either vertically or horizontally, and honor s the parent site s theme. 1 Source: AIIM Industry Watch: Connecting and Optimizing SharePoint, March Metadata property map properties extracted from documents during crawls, called crawled properties, to managed properties that users can use in search queries 5

6 Gimmal Smart Tiles provides the ability to display a list of links within SharePoint as Windows style tiles, with descriptive text in mouse-over-activated animation. Smart Tiles can apply a background image, have various sizes for the tile, and make some tiles more visible than others in the group. The Smart Tiles app also provides a way to store multiple groups of links in the same source list, and only display tiles for a specific group. With Smart Tiles, SharePoint sites can have a more modern look and feel, and provide a more visual way to interact with the environment. Gimmal Personal Sidebar is a personalized, slide out interface, for SharePoint. The Personal Sidebar allows users to create personal dashboards containing links to documents, notifications, calendar data, and other personally relevant information. With the Personal Sidebar, users have control over specific elements of their sidebar, allowing each user to personalize it to their own work habits. 6

7 Gimmal Quick Poll provides a simple way to create single-question polls, and display the poll results in an easy to read, pie-chart format. Quick Poll results are anonymous, so no one can determine what response a particular respondent gave. A poll can be scheduled to begin or end on a specific date. Quick Poll makes administration easier by allowing multiple polls to be managed in a single list. With better social enablement and polls, users can better interact and collaborate in SharePoint. The Gimmal Enhanced Template Manager provides the ability to associate multiple document templates to a single content type. It also enables administrators to segregate document templates into security constrained groups, so users only see templates to which they have been granted permission. The Gimmal Enhanced Template Manager provides organizations with a more standardized environment which results in increased productivity. Gimmal Community expands SharePoint s social functionality by making those features available in full-html across multi-line text fields in any list that supports these fields. With Community any field will behave like a SharePoint Newsfeed field when a # character is entered. Governance Left alone, SharePoint can become the Wild West of your organization, with company sponsored high value sites mixed in with rogue, unauthorized sites, lists and libraries. Information becomes difficult to access and more importantly, impossible to manage. Applying a lifecycle to SharePoint sites is nothing new, but there is a deeper requirement than setting a site policy to delete after a certain time period. Organizations are looking to enable a repeatable process that leverages pre-defined templates that involve pre-applied policies to sites. More so, they want to make sure the right people are enabled to create sites and that every single site created can be managed against corporate policy and regulations, and be within the purview of IT. Gimmal SharePoint governance capabilities enable organizations to deliver these repeatable processes and configurations that can be optimized against business and regulatory requirements. This ensures centralized management and delegation in line with corporate policies and business rules. The following are capabilities that the Gimmal Platform offers to support extended and enhanced Governance in SharePoint: Gimmal Drop Zones can help an organization easily add correct and consistent metadata to documents. With Drop Zones, users drag and drop single or multiple documents into a SharePoint site without excessive prompting and, if chosen, can also be prompted for the metadata that has not been pre-filled. By understanding the user context, Drop Zones pre-fill metadata in a document and populate metadata more consistently. Drop Zones have many configurable options that can hide metadata fields, manage document approval and publishing and even make the entire upload process fully automated. 7

8 Gimmal s Mega Menu allows organizations to create configurable, consistent, centrally managed navigation menus across sites. A Mega Menu can include text, images, groupings, and descriptions that can be targeted to specific audiences and controlled by a display template. With Mega Menu, users now have a powerful site navigation feature that facilitates easy navigation throughout a SharePoint site hierarchy and allows users to easily find relevant information without having to search. Gimmal Metadata Inheritance Rules (MIR) are used to provide flexible, centralized, and granular metadata rules across the SharePoint environment. These rules eliminate the need to define them at a library or site level and removes the restriction of Site Column defaults. Gimmal MIR, makes it easier for organizations to find and manage content and ensure the lifecycle of documents. Gimmal Site Provisioning enables administrators, without the use of any code, to control how end users create SharePoint sites. With Gimmal Site Provisioning, users have the flexibility to configure a new SharePoint 8

9 site through an intuitive wizard interface that ensures the right features at the time of site provisioning, while enforcing consistent organizational governance requirements. Gimmal Site Provisioning ensures organizational guidelines are met and that key features are present in every site while allowing decentralized site creation. Furthermore, it alleviates IT involvement from the creation and configuration of SharePoint Sites. Gimmal Branding Manager enforces consistent branding across the SharePoint farm through centrally managed rules. When a user takes the initiative to change the look of a site, they can only apply companyapproved templates with new sites being created according to the defined parameters of the corporate brand guidelines. Gimmal Branding Manager assures a consistent look and feel in SharePoint sites across the enterprise that represents the organization s brand. The Gimmal Display Template Manager allows an organization to display lists and list view web parts easily using included display templates, or custom templates. It extends SharePoint s client side rendering by allowing the application of a display template to any list s underlying view. The Display Template Manager provides an interface through which the end user can map list fields to fields defined on the display template. With the Gimmal Display Template Manager, a list view is rendered by the template no matter where the view is used. The Gimmal Search Configuration Manager makes implementing search configuration across multiple sites easier as users see a consistent search experience across the organization. Gimmal Content Organizer Manager provides the ability to centrally manage and publish SharePoint content organizer rules across a SharePoint farm. Through centralized rules, Content Organizer Manager facilitates the creation of a consistent information architecture and taxonomy across a SharePoint farm. This extends the horizontal scaling of the SharePoint infrastructure while at the same time reduces the number of unique configurations, custom processes and applications. Gimmal Social Seed Manager allows an organization to jump-start company-wide use and adoption of SharePoint s Newsfeed social functionality. It does this by automatically setting up users as followers to 9

10 follow a specified set of social actors like Users, Hashtags, Documents, and Sites. By doing so, the Social Seed Manager directly connects users to a pre-populated, or seeded, social fabric. The Gimmal Document Center determines where a library can be created and what settings that library will have when it is created. By default, it creates a sub-site and restricts libraries to only that site. The Document Center provides tiles that visually convey intuitive information about a library s contents and purpose. The Document Center s behavior is governed by a centrally managed set of rules. These rules can be applied globally to all Document Centers, or they may be overridden for a particular Document Center. Gimmal Site Decommissioning governs site proliferation by determining an end-state for existing sites in SharePoint. Administrators configure a definition that serves to control the active lifespan of a site collection or an individual site. Sites can be closed, quarantined or deleted. With Gimmal Site Decommissioning an organization can cultivate artifacts in sites and help manage the growth of SharePoint sites, all of which is very important in Office 365 where resource consumption is a key ingredient to usage rates. Compliance Organizations must comply with the regulations that govern their industries in their jurisdictions and the company policies they set themselves. To be in compliance is to adhere to those rules, guidelines, procedures and policies. When properly enabled, compliance solutions can deliver a single point of control for people, applications and information - ensuring that the right people have the right access to the right information. Gimmal provides advanced compliance capabilities that can be delivered through SharePoint to the organizations that use it. It extends SharePoint s native records management capabilities and is certified against the gold standard for compliance meeting the US Department of Defense guidelines. Gimmal can ensure that your organization s most critical and valued information is securely managed in SharePoint. The Gimmal Compliance Suite extends SharePoint s native records capabilities to provide a reliable and centralized site for collaboration and records management that is compliant with both the Baseline and Classified elements of the Department of Defense (DoD) Records Management guidelines. 10

11 Classified Records support provides enhancements to Compliance Suite that enable the management of classified records in accordance with the Department of Defense standard. Classified records are those highly regulated records within an organization that require security level access and that are only declassified and made public in accordance with federal or organizational guidelines. With the Gimmal Compliance Suite and Classified Records, any organization can meet the DoD standard in a native SharePoint system. The Gimmal Expiration Notification Manager provides information management policy (IMP) expiration functionality through centralized notification definitions that are uniformly enforced across the SharePoint. Included are configurable rules for notifications, grace periods before an expiration action, and a minimum notification threshold. Widespread, and scheduled notifications allow stakeholders to react appropriately to expiration events. Aggregated Disposition Report provides the ability to consolidate expiration and disposition auditing reports across web apps, site collections and sites. This report shows all audit events related to the expiration and disposition of content based on a user-specified query and returns the data in a user-friendly report. This gives organizations a single view of consolidated disposition actions across web apps, site collections and sites. Gimmal Convenience Copy Management generates regulated copies or links from a source document termed the principal, or generates a principal from a source document and leaves a regulated copy or link in the system of record. Users often need copies or links to a principal document for reference, convenience, research, or to be used as a template for future work. With Gimmal Convenience Copy Management, organizations can reduce risk and better manage unregulated copies in SharePoint. Gimmal Enterprise Events allows an organization to perform conditional event-based aging for documents and records in SharePoint. Enterprise Events enables the management of location-based and/or content-type based retention and can be used outside or inside of a Records Center. With this, compliance actions can be executed beyond SharePoint s standard date-based retention and include actions that occur as a result of a business event. 11

12 Gimmal Physical Information Management (PIM) allows an organization to manage physical information, both onsite and offsite, from a common SharePoint experience. PIM allows an organization to have a unified view and access point of an entire information inventory. With Gimmal PIM, physical information becomes actionable in SharePoint, reducing the cost and complexity of compliance. Gimmal Advanced Content Type Retention provides organizations with a centralized means of controlling retention expiration for content types in SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online (Office 365). Advanced Content Retention greatly simplifies content retention management resulting in greater control, selectivity, and flexibility of retention date calculations for any given item of a particular content type. With Advanced Content Retention, organizations can now better manage their records in place, keeping records in context. Gimmal Item Audit provides an audit history to be displayed on a per item basis in SharePoint and ensures audit information is available at any time. This greatly increases the usability of the audit information as users can easily see the changes made to an individual item without having to ask an administrator to run an audit report on a whole library or site. The functionality is integrated as an entry into the Action Menu and is also available from the ribbon bar. Gimmal Item Audit History Admin allows for an authorized user to define connections to SharePoint site collections for use by Gimmal Item Audit History. 12

13 Summary The Gimmal platform for information management for SharePoint and Office 365 delivers extensive benefits across your organization. With Gimmal, your IT department can facilitate centrally managed and governed instances of SharePoint that deliver optimized business processes and storage management. SharePoint also becomes the integration platform for business applications driving a more engaging and broadly adopted user experience. Older SharePoint sites and the massive volumes of content that live within them are consolidated or see an orderly, policy driven retirement. Costly legacy ECM systems are also retired lessening maintenance costs, and the high personnel costs associated with them. On-Premises, Hybrid and Office 365 Cloud support offers the deployment flexibility to meet any environment requirements with the assurance that governance, privacy or security needs can be met. Legal departments and records managers can now be assured that business critical documents can be centrally managed under unified policy, in an automated environment. Formal records management is observed in SharePoint for both electronic and physical records and document retention and legal holds requirements can be easily met. And possibly for the first time, there is an ability to reduce the reliance on end users to properly tag metadata on documents to support their full lifecycle, or create a fully automated process that can be deployed to ensure proper metadata management takes place. End users see a unified experience in SharePoint that seamlessly connects them to the information repositories and business applications (i.e. SAP) that they use to do their work. They easily navigate between sites, appropriate content is promoted to them, they can connect to business processes and workflows, and it is easy to find the content they need. Each site can look and behave like all others, making it intuitive, and reducing the number of clicks necessary to perform any action. Content from key business systems, like SAP is available to users, and incorporated into SharePoint business processes. All forms of content, included, are managed in their environment. The Gimmal Platform provides extensive information governance depth of capability for SharePoint to empower an organization and implement a best-in-class SharePoint environment that lowers the cost of information management for the organization, drives a powerful user experience and allows the organization to meet their regulatory and compliance mandates. About Us Gimmal is the world s leading provider of solutions built on Microsoft SharePoint that extend and enhance its broad enterprise information management and governance capabilities and provide SAP content archiving and interoperability. With Gimmal s ground-breaking and award-winning solutions you can easily transform SharePoint into a platform that consistently governs and manages the content, documents and records in your organization and work with content online or offline from your Windows 8 PC, Tablet or Windows Phone. For more information, visit 13