Managing social data: is SharePoint the answer?

• Author: Chapman, Andrew
• Position: Cover story

Records management (RM) professionals have been challenged to manage electronic data for some time. Their efforts have tended to focus on unstructured data, such as documents, scanned images, and spreadsheets. Recently, structured data held in databases has also come under close scrutiny, especially during discovery.

However, there is a third category of data that tends to be overlooked. This type of data lies between unstructured and structured data and is a result of the explosion in Web 2.0 technologies (e.g., blogs, wikis, web pages, activity feeds). The temptation is to call this "semi-structured data," but the database world already owns that term; for the sake of clarity we will call it "social data."

What Is Social Data?

Technically, social data is structured data that has an associated presentation layer. Confused? Consider a practical example like a blog. A blog entry looks like an unstructured document with paragraphs of text and associated headings. However, if you looked inside the SharePoint server, you'd discover the blog page is actually stored as structured data in the SQL database. Would you consider a blog unstructured as it appears or structured as it is stored? Neither, it is a classic example of social data.

In the world of enterprise content management and records management, you can think of social data as being data that looks like unstructured data to the end user, but the underlying content follows a pre-determined structure. In most cases, the underlying data will actually be stored in a relational database; in other cases (e.g., XML and HTML), the content is encapsulated within the actual object itself.

From a records management perspective, this means you either need to retain both the data and the presentation layer or a standalone rendered copy of the data that encapsulates both the data and the view. Take for example a web page; should you store the HTML file and associated style sheets, or should you render the completed web page to PDF and store the PDF?

What Makes Social Data a Different Use-Case?

The list of social data types you might find in SharePoint includes blogs, blog comments, wiki pages, activity feeds, surveys, tasks, calendar items, web pages, and XML. With the exception of XML, all of these items are actually stored by SharePoint as structured data in SQL server.

As discussed previously, consideration needs to be given with regards to what represents a social data's copy of record, but that's not the only thing that makes social data an important consideration.

Consider that the list of types of social data is long and growing rapidly. More and more companies are using social data tools for critical business applications; the records teams may not be aware of it yet, but it is happening. Blogs are being used to disseminate internal company plans, and wikis are used as a way of collaborating on external-facing documentation. Teams within organizations are collaborating on legal contracts using instant messaging tools.

Typically, access to conventional structured data is well controlled. For example, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that creates it will control who can access, update, and delete the content that it generates and can audit the process. Social data systems might generate the same kind of structured data behind the scenes, but the access model around those systems will typically be less regulated. Within a...