IRMS podcast series

In this podcast Vincent Hoolt describes the new guidelines of the Netherlands government towards managing its own email. The guidelines ask Netherlands government agencies to schedule the email accounts of selected key staff for permanent preservation. The officials concerned usually constitute around 5% of the headcount of an agency.  The email within the accounts of other staff are retained for ten years.   All individuals are able to delete or move personal and trivial email within a window of ten weeks after the email was sent/received. The policy draws its inspiration from the Capstone approach adopted by NARA towards US federal government email.   Vincent talks about how the policy is working in practice, and the challenges of managing email accounts over time and in the context of GDPR. Vincent Hoolt is Recordkeeping advisor at the Netherlands National Archives.  Vincent was interviewed by James Lappin on 21 December 2020.  The guidelines on managing Netherlands government email are available (in Dutch) from here .

In this podcast Rob Bath joins James Lappin to explore the records management implications of the recent meteoric rise in adoption of Microsoft Teams. Rob describes: measures that can be taken to reduce the risk of Microsoft Teams sprawl, and to ensure that administrators can track the ownership of each Team; the modular structure of MS Teams, the absence of any overarching structure above each Team, and the implications of the fact that the list of an organisation's Teams is available only to those with access to the Compliance centre of their organisation's Microsoft 365 tenancy; the reasons why the majority of Teams message traffic tends to go through individual chat accounts rather than through Team channels; the debates over the basis on which retention decisions should be made on messages in individual Teams chat accounts; the technical barriers to closing and archiving a Team; the relationship between MS Teams and SharePoint, and the implications of a Microsoft Teams roll out for an organisation's existing SharePoint implementation. Rob Bath is Information Management & Compliance Practice Lead at Intelogy. He is also Digital Director for IRMS. Rob's blogpost on configuration choices with regard to MS Teams (referred to in the podcast) can be found here. His blogpost on retention issues in relation to MS Teams can be found here. Rob's recent webinar on the governance of MS Teams can be viewed on the IRMS YouTube channel here. Rob Bath was interviewed by James Lappin on 12 August 2020.

In this podcast Mark Bell (TNA) and Leontien Talboom (UCL and TNA) describe the machine learning club they have set up at the UK National Archives (TNA) to help archivists at TNA develop their AI literacy.   They describe how they have taken the group through a series of stages to introduce them to data science, to give them experience of preparing data, and to enable them to develop their intuitions about how different machine learning models work (Naive Bayes, Support vector machines etc.), and an understanding of the challenges that AI can (and can't) be used to tackle.   They also describe how they intend to move on to discuss some key issues in the application of AI to records, including the issue of the explainability of AI decisions and the issue of capturing the machine learning model itself as a record.   Mark Bell is Senior digital researcher at TNA.  Leontien Talboom  is a doctoral researcher working with UCL's Department of Information Studies and with TNA.   Mark and Leontien were interviewed by James Lappin on 22 May 2020.   Links: Mark Bell profile:  https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/our-research-and-academic-collaboration/our-research-and-people/staff-profiles/mark-bell/   Leontein Talboom profile: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/information-studies/leontien-talboom   James Lappin blog https://thinkingrecords.co.uk/

In this podcast Tom Midgley shares his experience of managing records within G Suite. Tom is records management lead at Hackney Council.   G Suite provides: communication channels (Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, and Currents) productivity tools (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Keep, Forms) storage locations - Drive (My Drive and Shared Drive) and Sites Tom talks us through how some of these tools and services can be used for recordkeeping, and how Google Vault and the Admin Panel can be used to manage content, rules and permissions across the suite. This conversation between James Lappin and Tom Midgley was recorded on Friday 13 March 2020.

In this episode Andrew Warland describes the various different component parts of the Office 365 environment that impact on records management. Andrew explains the records management model within Office 365, and the role of the Compliance Admin Centre in the application of retention rules. He discusses the impact on SharePoint of the rise in popularity of MS Teams, and describes the various locations in which Office 365 stores the content created through MS Teams.  Andrew describes the relationship between MS Teams and Office 365 Groups, and explains why he recommends that in order to govern MS Teams effectively it is necessary to take away the ability for end-users  to create new Office 365 Groups. Andrew was interviewed by James Lappin on Friday 7 February 2020

In this interview Alan Pelz-Sharpe shares lessons learned from existing information management projects using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Alan describes how such projects differ from document management system roll out projects; and explains why he thinks that AI and machine learning offer a golden opportunity for records management and information governance professionals.  Alan was interviewed by James Lappin on 5 December 2019.

Rich Hale, Chief Technology Officer for Active Navigation, discusses the analytics and business intelligence capabilities within his company's product.   He  describes how such capabilities can be used to take action on content held on fileshares, SharePoint and on Microsoft Exchange email servers.

Mark Godfrey discusses the reasons why he and Simon Cole co-founded Automated Intelligence, and describes how the company set out to fill the gaps between SharePoint and a fully fledged Enterprise Content Management product    

Andrew Warland discusses the information architecture choices that UnitingCare NSW.ACT made in their SharePoint implementation

Laurence Hart discusses trends in collaboration software and records management software