Monday, July 13, 2009

SharePoint and Regulatory Compliance Part 3 (The EU gets involved)

It seems that I have stumbled on to an easy to blog about theme recently with the use of SharePoint and regulatory compliance. Another SharePoint article came to my attention recently regarding the European Union's new MiFID regulations that are going into effect on November 1st.

The above article is from the Windows Financial services magazine and has a MS outlook (outlook as in forecast, not the email client) on how the new EU MiFID regulations will affect companies and how SharePoint can fit in to filling some of these regulatory requirements. Again using existing Microsoft infrastructure, SharePoint can be a great resource in regards to complying with these regulations.

SharePoint 2010 Best Practices Analyzer

One of the features of SharePoint 2010 that I was most interested to see was the Best Practices Analyzer. Judging from this video demonstration, the BPA is a customizable feature that will run jobs to check your environments health, then list the issues it finds along with fixes for those issues (being Microsoft hopefully the fix won't direct you to a page that says "There are no known fixes for this issue", which seems to happen a lot for MS directed linking.) This is the the integration of the previously available BPA, not sure how much different it is though until we actually see more of it in action.
It seems that there is a list containing these jobs and it allows you to customize what is run, when it is run and also an option on whether you wish to have the job fix the issue per MS recommendations. In theory a great idea, not sure how it will work in practice though.
A couple questions stick out for me. What if these 'fixes' will disable or remove some functionality without the administrator knowing? I can just imagine that troubleshooting nightmare.
Also are all features turned on by default? I remember back from a previous life I was involved with a MOM implementation and when we first turned that on everything was enabled and it took weeks of tuning to get the environment functioning, nowhere near as to what the BPA seems to be, but none the less what MS thinks is imperative could be a nuisance for an Admin to deal with.
Those are just some quick thoughts on the BPA, take a look at the video of SharePoint 2010 and let me know what you think.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Site

Over the weekend, Microsoft rolled out a new SharePoint site for the 2010 product offering. This site has basically corralled all the random bits and blurbs from around the various Microsoft sites and polished them into this marketable site. Looks like Microsoft is going to ramp up big time to push 2010 and all it's associated features.
The best part is the 'sneak peek' of the new interface. The interactive Office 2007 style ribbon at the top looks like it will be a great new feature, one location for all SharePoint actions as a user or admin. Cannot wait to get my hands on this.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

SharePoint and Regulatory Compliance - Part 2

A colleague who works in conjunction with the financial industry brought to my attention a recent proposal by FINRA, the independent regulator for the financial services industry in the United States. FINRA has proposed (FINRA proposal SR-FINRA-2009-30) that members create a contemporaneous record, for customer and order information. Basically, if I understand this correctly, this will require the member Broker/Dealers and Investment Advisors to standardize and track information and orders for compliance, preferably electronically. Most of the larger firms, the Fidelity’s of the world, already have systems and the resources in place to comply. But what about the individual or small group firms that may not have the technological resources to implement a solution?
Of course I am going to suggest SharePoint, it can be implemented, configured to force standardization, and maintain records and versions of data. As in the previous post, Microsoft has a section of their Office site that points out the benefits of using SharePoint for regulatory compliance for all industries.

Note- the link seems to have gone away for the MS site could not find anything after a quick search so here is a link to download MS documentation in regards to compliance.