Managing information in a pandemic: Microsoft 365 By Claire Boyle
W
ith the challenges of the last year and a half, many organisations have been forced to adapt to new ways of working and implement new technologies, perhaps earlier than they would otherwise have done so. While the increased use of remote-working technology offers many wonderful opportunities for organisations, for information managers it can cause a bit of a headache.
Although my organisation’s journey of information management within Microsoft 365 began before lockdown did, the sudden move to home working certainly increased the popularity of Teams, and so it felt pertinent to look at how we manage information in the Microsoft 365 suite, as part of the Coping with COVID edition. It’s important to set out at the start that this is not a guide on how to perfectly manage information in Microsoft 365, nor is it a claim that the organisation has completed its implementation. Rather it’s an account of what controls the Information Governance team have been putting in place, why those were chosen and whether we believe it has worked.
Information Governance has deployed, and still is deploying, SharePoint across the organisation as a corporate information storage tool, replacing our use of shared drives. IT led the rollout of OneDrive, again replacing the use of network drives for personal storage. And Teams, although subsequently picked up by IT as a replacement for Skype, was largely found by the business areas themselves. Starting with the biggest repository of information in the Microsoft 365 suite, SharePoint, Information Governance launched a project in 2019 to transfer all our corporate information from shared drives into
Microsoft 365 was purchased by the organisation some years ago, with the main driver being Outlook, but the organisation quickly realised that there was more to be exploited than just e-mail. Today, we make use of many of the tools, but from an information governance point of view, the ones that have had some level of control implemented are SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive. INFORMATION AND RECORDS MANAGEMENT SOCIETY 13
