We spend the majority of our time on our devices creating content, saving documents, drafting multiple versions of proposals, etc. Although necessary and beneficial, the vast amount of content we create for our company can easily get lost in the sheer numbers. This is why metadata is essential.
What is Metadata?
Put simply; metadata is data about data. In this context, it can be described as easily identifiable information about your content. It makes finding and working with information easier.
When applied correctly, metadata can provide essential aid in finding, protecting, and governing your company’s information. However, if your content’s metadata is missing or generic, the content is nearly useless. Lack of metadata leads to redundant, lost, and non-compliant information that will make any records manager’s job exponentially harder and weaken an organization’s information governance strategy.
The Challenge with Metadata
Businesses create tons of content every day. For record managers, the need to attach metadata to this influx of content is vital to ensure proper records management. Some examples of content that require metadata are:
- Policies and Procedures
- Purchase Orders and Invoices
- Contracts and Work Orders
- Material Specification Sheet
- Engineering Drawings and Geographic Information System (GIS) Drawings
- Requests for Proposals
- Employee Documents
- Scanned Physical Content
As records managers know all too well, the amount of incoming records paired with the demand to keep all necessary information compliant can quickly become overwhelming. Even those who use content services have difficulty finding, securing, and disposing of information when it is not tagged appropriately. The ability to manage information becomes nearly impossible if there is no “useful” metadata
SharePoint Syntex and Gimmal Records
What’s the solution? How can you stop the cycle of overwhelming contact ingestion and ease the burden of metadata tagging? For the many organizations that use Microsoft 365, there may be a simple solution. With the recent release of SharePoint Syntex, Microsoft has made it easier for users to tackle the task of metadata tagging.
SharePoint Syntex captures records managers’ expertise through the use of no-code machine learning. Users teach the artificial intelligence model to read content and recognize critical pieces of information. Once trained to read and understand the content, SharePoint Syntex is primed to take the burden of tagging content with metadata.
Records managers now take the next step to train SharePoint Syntex to extract and apply metadata to appropriate metadata columns. This extraction and application of key facts found in the content improves the user’s suggestive search experience and provides crucial information that records managers need to manage and dispose of records in a compliant manner.
For example, SharePoint Syntex can be trained to recognize a record, extracting, and tagging metadata on what the record is, like a contract or a document containing PII. Additionally, Syntex can extract a date from the document to calculate its expiration. With this, records managers can go from not being able to manage unstructured, non-defined content to being able to identify sensitive information and apply regulatory retention.
While Microsoft is a powerful platform that now makes it easier for metadata tagging with the use of SharePoint Syntex, users may have more complicated retention and disposition requirements that extend beyond Microsoft’s out-of-the-box capabilities. This is where Gimmal Records comes into the picture.
Gimmal Records enhances Microsoft’s records management capabilities by offering full-lifecycle management of records. With this tool, records managers can adopt flexible multi-phase lifecycles built around metadata. Users can create event-based, rule-based, and date-based triggers to ensure appropriate retention of content. Legal holds, record rejection, and the ability to allow multiple disposition approvers gives records managers the flexibility needed to adhere to even the most complex information governance initiatives.
With its repository-agnostic approach, Gimmal Records capabilities extend to other repositories such as Box, File Shares, Email, FileNet, and more. It ensures that all documents are easily accessible and compliant according to regulatory requirements, no matter where they reside.
In conjunction with Gimmal Records, SharePoint Syntex provides Microsoft users the ability to fully take control of their information by using automation and machine learning to ensure compliance. SharePoint Syntex gives businesses the ability to extract useful information from documents and apply the extracted information as metadata. From there, Gimmal Records can leverage the newly extracted metadata to apply retention as mandated by the company’s file plan. Together, SharePoint Syntex and Gimmal Records create a powerful way to create an effective information governance foundation.
Learn more about SharePoint Syntex and Gimmal Records can work together for your organization.