INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
PART ONE
Project Cortex and the future of document management in Office 365 BY JAMES LAPPIN
To understand Microsoft’s strategy for document management in Office 365, it is more instructive to look at what they are doing with Delve, MS Teams and Project Cortex than it is to look at what they are doing with SharePoint.
W
hat has changed is that cloud suites, such as Office 365 and G Suite, have created a much closer relationship between document management systems and the other corporate systems holding ‘unstructured’ data, such as e-mail systems, file shares and instant messaging (IM)/chat. This closer relationship is fuelling developments in the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that the big cloud providers are including in their offerings. Project Cortex, set to come to Office 365 during 2020, is the latest example of an AI capability that is built upon an ability to map the interconnections between content in the document management system and communication behaviour in e-mail and chat.
SHAREPOINT IN THE ON-PREMISE ERA In its on-premise days, SharePoint was, in many ways, a typical corporate document management system. It was the type of system in which: •
colleagues were expected to upload documents, add metadata and place documents within some kind of overarching corporate structure;
•
information managers would work to optimise the information architecture and, in particular, the search capability, the metadata schema and the structure of the system;
•
retention rules would be held and applied to content.
It was the type of system that an organisation might call their ‘corporate records system’ on the grounds that documents within the system were likely to have better metadata and be better governed than documents held elsewhere.
SHAREPOINT IN THE CLOUD ERA In Office 365, SharePoint’s role is evolving differently. Its essential role is to provide document management services (through its document libraries) and (small-scale) data management services (through its lists) to the other applications in the Office 365 family and, in particular, to MS Teams. iQ | 35
