Microsoft Corp. announced recently that Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has received U.S. Department of Defense 5015.2 certification. Endorsed by the National Archives and Records Administration, the 5015.2 standard, on which the DoD certification is based, serves as the benchmark for government and corporate organizations that manage records and documents. The current version of DoD 5015.2-STD, signed April 25, 2007, defines the basic requirements based on operational, legislative, and legal needs that must be met by records management application products acquired by the Department of Defense (DoD) and its Components. It defines requirements for managing classified records and includes requirements to support the Freedom of Information Act, Privacy Act, and interoperability.

Microsoft utilized the SharePoint platform in meeting the DoD 5015.2 criteria, integrating Exchange Server 2007 and extending SharePoint Server 2007's records management capabilities with an add-on pack that will be available free to customers later this year. With respect to records management and compliance, Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers information management and retention enabling organizations to control the way content is managed to enforce compliance with corporate, legal, or governmental policies. To define information management policies for their sites, organizations can use the predefined policy features such as auditing, bar codes, and expiration individually or in combination, or they can develop custom information management policies. The Records Center site template is designed to help organizations implement their records management and retention programs. This site template extends standard Office SharePoint Server 2007 features with additional records management capabilities including vault abilities that help ensure the integrity of records stored within the Records Center, records routing, information management policy enforcement, and the ability to add records that are subject to litigation or investigations to a hold list. Information Rights Management allows organizations to limit the actions that users can take on files that have been downloaded, and limits the set of users and programs that are allowed to decrypt these files. IRM can also limit the rights of the users who are allowed to read files so they cannot take actions such as printing copies of the files or copying text from them.

We believe that this announcement is noteworthy because it seems to confirm our belief that SharePoint is likely to emerge as a very strategic product for Microsoft in the enterprise market—more strategic than it would seem at the moment—and that Microsoft recognizes the leverage generated by conformance with government standards. We believe that SharePoint is Microsoft's way of attempting to seize the center ground, and not the battlefield occupied by SQL against Oracle, nor the operating system battle, but a way to be at the eye of the storm: the ultimate repository of all information regardless of format.

The U.S. government is among the largest buyers of information technology in the world. It also influences a great deal of other activity directly and indirectly. If Microsoft succeeds at leveraging SharePoint as the standard repository within the DoD, then it is in a commanding position to become the standard for the rest of the Federal government, state governments, and perhaps suppliers/contractors to the public sector overall. In a recent seminar we heard one major high technology company proclaim that SharePoint will become its "official" storage platform. That firm cited compliance and e-discovery issues as one motivation; however, any CIO that can claim his architecture is based on government-approved standards will find themselves a leg up on the competition. Overall, we believe this announcement puts the market on notice that Microsoft has recognized the importance of government certification and that SharePoint will be a keystone in its long term strategy.