How many records archives do you have in your organization? It’s likely you store records in a number of different systems. What about your paper records? Stored in another location separately from your digital records. Having all your records managed in different archives makes it very challenging to ensure records governance. The good news is you can manage all your archiving needs, paper and digital, with one system.

1. Records Governance,
Part 2:
Can One Solution
Manage All Your
Archiving Needs?
How many records archives do you have
in your organization? It’s likely you store
records in a number of different systems.
What about your paper records? Stored
in another location separately from your
digital records. Having all your records
managed in different archives makes
it very challenging to ensure records
governance. The good news is you can
manage all your archiving needs, paper
and digital, with one system.
www.everteam.com
745 Atlantic Avenue, Boston, MA 02111 – USA

2. Managing Paper Archives
There are two types of records organizations manage: physical (paper)
records and digital (electronic) records. Paper records are typically managed
separately from digital records, sometimes stored in file rooms within an
organization, often stored off-site in specialized archives by commercial
records archive companies, such as Iron Mountain. In some cases, an
organization might use more than one paper archive vendor to store its
records.
Just like digital archives, your organization must ensure paper records are
stored securely and safely, and can be easily retrieved when requested.
Paper archives also have the same lifecycle process as digital records, which
can include long-term archive or disposal via destruction.
Proper classification and tagging are required to manage paper archives
properly. Unfortunately, this is not always done, or done in an inconsistent
way, making the management of paper archives challenging.
Many organizations today have a vast growing volume of digital records to manage.
These digital archives are usually managed separately from paper archives. Digital
archives are stored within the systems that created them or in a standalone records
archive repository, or some combination of the two approaches.
Because digital records often remain within the systems that created them,
organizations find themselves manually searching archives to find the records they
need and manually applying governance to each managed system. This manual
process takes time and is prone to errors because it’s not consistent.
You can simplify this complicated records management process through the use of a
centralized records management solution that doesn’t necessarily centralize all the
digital records in one physical location, but instead, tracks and manages governance
through a single system. A centralized approach to records governance is critical
considering the volume of digital records to manage.
Managing Digital
Archives
Records Governance, Part 2: Can One Solution Manage All Your Archiving Needs? 2

3. Records Governance, Part 2: Can One Solution Manage All Your Archiving Needs? 3
A Centralized
Approach to
Manage All
Records
Some organizations might find it works fine to have separate records archive solutions for
paper and digital records, but with the growing volume of records to store and manage, these
organizations are few.
The best approach to managing all your records - paper and digital - is using a centralized
solution. These solutions do exist.
Centralized records archives solutions don’t care where a record is stored, they simply enable
you to track all the records you have and manage them holistically, wherever they are located.
The benefits of a single records archive solution are many. Probably one of the most important is the
ability to search in a single location for the records you need and have a result set returned that crosses
all records archives.
Consider wanting to find all the records you have on a customer who has been with your company for
many years. Some of these records might be paper-based, stored in an off-site records archive facility.
Other records are spread across several different systems within the organization.
Without a centralized records archive solution, a records manager would have to manually go to each
system and search for the records they need. Then they would have to contact the off-site archive
facility and put in a request for any paper archives related to the customer.
Now consider this. Every system that stores records is classifying the records a little differently. The
classification schemes and metadata are applied ad hoc or based on how the initial system was set up.
The classification scheme for paper records is also different. It could take days or weeks, even months
to find the records you need.
With a centralized records archive solution, a consistent classification and metadata scheme is applied
to all records, regardless of location. Searching becomes much easier, and you can be confident you
are getting all the records you need. In this system, if the records are electronic, they are simply a click
away.
If they are paper, you click a button and have a request send to the paper archive provider to retrieve
the records and send them to you.The paper records are automatically sent, and you have a record of
who requested them and where there were sent. Even if the paper archives are located with different
providers, a separate request is sent to each to retrieve the required records.
For the records manager, it doesn’t matter where the records are located; they simply have a single
location to search and get back a complete result set they need.
A Single Search and
Retrieve Function

4. A Final Note
The volume of records your organization stores is likely enormous
and growing bigger every day. This growth is making it harder to
manage records, especially through separate manual processes.
Whether you have separate archives for digital records or paper
archives, there is an easier way to ensure your governance policies
are applied and managed - through a central archive solution.
A centralized records archive gives you a single location to track,
classify, search and manage governance policies for all your
records, improving your ability to retrieve information quickly and
ensure company and industry compliance regulations are applied
consistently across the company.
Records Governance, Part 2: Can One Solution Manage All Your Archiving Needs? 4
For a centralized archive solution to be successful, a consistent, cohesive content strategy is critical. A
centralized classification and metadata scheme is very important to ensure that records, digital and
paper, have the proper tags and metadata applied.
Searching and retrieving records without a central content strategy approach can’t ensure you will find
the right records. Imagine trying to search all your records for a customer that relate to a particular
transaction. If the transaction ID is recorded differently in each records system and there is no
centralized method that matches up the different ID types, then you will not find the records you need.
Much of the classification process can be automated, especially during record creation and use of the
record during its lifetime, but manually tagging is also often necessary to ensure the completeness.
A Consistent Con-
tent Strategy is Key
Another key benefit to a centralized records archive is the ability to define and apply governance
policies to the entire archive from a single location.
Governance policies include how long to store a record, who has the rights to search for the record,
who can view it, request it and so on. Governance policies apply to the entire lifecycle of a record from
the time it is created to its eventual disposition (whether that’s destruction or long-term archival).
Also, with a centralized archive, you have one place to update governance policies and ensure they are
applied consistently across all records, regardless of location.
A Centralized Gover-
nance Process

5. www.everteam.com
info@everteam.com
About
Everteam
Everteam brings over 25 years’ experience and innovation to the field of Enterprise Content
Management. In an ever-increasing legal and compliance environment, Everteam’s range
of products support the improvement of content –driven processes, and enable enterprise
customers to easily monitor and align their content strategies for overall organizational
efficiency and effectiveness.
+33 (0)1 72 71 33 3
336, rue Saint-Honoré,
75001 Paris – France
+1 (650) 596-1800 (voice) / +1 (650) 249-0439 (fax)
745 Atlantic Avenue
Boston, MA 02111 United States