With the release of SharePoint 2013, Microsoft has enhanced enterprise content management (ECM) functionality in several core areas. These improvements will help SharePoint users adhere to best practices for content management and e-discovery. Improvements include:
E-Discovery: Whereas SharePoint 2010 could discover content in SharePoint only, SharePoint 2013 can discover content not only stored in SharePoint, but also associated with Exchange Server and Lync, Microsoft’s enterprise-ready unified communications platform. Additionally, e-discovery can extend to multiple SharePoint farms. SharePoint 2013 incorporates a new feature called the Discovery Center, which is designed to help administrators manage discovery cases and holds from a single site, whereas discovery in SharePoint 2010 was done from each individual sit. It establishes a portal through which they can access discovery cases to perform queries, put content on hold, and export content from both Exchange and SharePoint.
Team Folders: In SharePoint 2013, team folders have their own email address and can receive email. More importantly for compliance and content management, they can include both SharePoint documents and emails delivered via Microsoft Exchange. Users can access team folders from either Outlook 2013 or SharePoint, and compliance policies for data holds and retention automatically apply to data in both platforms.
Managed Metadata: One of the foundations of knowledge and content management is the concept of taxonomies (knowledge organization systems) and managed metadata (collections of terms defined and used as attributes for items). In SharePoint 2013, developers can create taxonomies with precise tagging strategies that meet detailed business needs. Specifically, SharePoint 2013 adds the concept of pinning to the management of metadata. In SharePoint 2010, terms could be reused in other locations, with reused terms able to be modified and those changes populated to every place the terms were used. With pinning, terms cannot be modified from the location where the terms are used.