Last Updated on May 15, 2023 Sarah Gayda
The Colligo team recently held a webinar, How to Succeed on Your Governance Journey & Arrive at Destination Compliance. We’re believers in the mantra that while compliance is the destination or end-goal, governance is the journey. As part of this, Colligo recommends leveraging metadata as the essential ingredient for gaining traction in your governance and compliance efforts. Governance and compliance are not easy, particular in the rapidly changing work environment.
We conducted several participant polls during the webinar that delivered insightful results. Below is a summary of respondents’ feedback and our analysis of the numbers, as we help you and your organization on your governance journey. You can also view the full webinar here.
1. The shift to the Cloud and Microsoft 365 still has a long way to go
Plenty of attention over the past year has been centred around the rapid ascent of applications like Teams and the Microsoft 365 suite, alongside general cloud adoption. And while this trend has been very strong, the reality is this shift still has a long way to go, and we are still in the middle stages of adoption.
During our talk, we highlighted the rapid shift to the cloud over the past several years, accelerated by the pandemic. However, we believe that there is still plenty of runway left to go in this transition. Attendees at our webinar feel the same way, with 62% of poll respondents indicating that they are on SharePoint Online, but a whopping 38% responding they are in either hybrid (a mix or SharePoint Server and on-premise) or unsure.
While this re-affirms our estimation that cloud adoption is in the early stages, and echoes what we hear from customers, we believe this represents a great opportunity. We look to continue to help organizations get more out of their Microsoft 365/Office 365 investments.
2. Time savings with an email capture solution are significant
A third of all respondents at our recent webinar indicated they take more than three minutes, on average, to file an email without a solution like Colligo. Further, 54% of respondents indicated they take over a minute to file an email.
Not only do knowledge workers spend too much time searching for content (according to McKinsey, employees spend 1.8 hours a day, nearly 20 percent of their work week, searching for documents), but also filing, capturing, and tagging emails and records. Fortunately, this is a core problem that Email Manager and now our Content Manager solve. Colligo significantly reduces the time spent filing emails, properly tagging with metadata and retention labels, and ensuring valuable documents end up in the right place. Metadata plays a big role in this; as highlighted during our presentation, metadata not only transforms your DMS from a ‘document graveyard’ into a ‘document cafeteria,’ it’s also the key to starting your governance engine.
3. Metadata, metadata, metadata
While the focus of the webinar was on utilizing metadata to achieve governance, and ultimately compliance, the Colligo team was surprised to see how many attendees are still utilizing file shares and file explorer for filing documents and records. We have long been proponents of using SharePoint (particularly, SharePoint Online). It was encouraging to see that 13% of respondents indicated they are utilizing metadata, but much work needs to be done here to optimize content and avoid sprawl in organizations.
While SharePoint is a very powerful Content Services Platform, it lacks complete capture and records management functionality, and depends on third-party applications and solutions to provide comprehensive functionality for organizations, as stressed by Gartner. In other words, third-party apps are needed to help ‘bridge the gaps’ in SharePoint functionality.
We are happy to explain the importance of metadata and help organizations properly structure their SharePoint environments any time so please reach out with any questions!
