Designing, Implementing & Managing Systems

Many NSW public offices have accumulated large amounts of data in legacy systems. The purpose of this guidance is to draw together advice and procedures to allow public offices to identify legacy systems, and identify and overcome the barriers to dealing with the data in those systems through migration and decommissioning as a routine component of its information management and technology program.

This guidance provides advice for NSW public offices on planning and performing migration processes so that they can meet the conditions for the destruction of source records, when appropriate.

Removable media is storage media which is designed to be removed from a computer. Removable media is low cost, portable and simple, allowing people to copy, store and carry large quantities of data easily between locations. Employees can share information easily and access it from a variety of locations, which can increase the organisation’s productivity. However there are a number of risks associated with the use of removable media.

Email messages sent and received in the course of official business are State records under the State Records Act 1998. This includes messages sent and received by Ministers in the course of their official duties. It also includes messages relating to any aspect of official (government) business coming from private email accounts.

Large amounts of corporate information and corporate risk are tied up in email systems. Email therefore needs special treatment by organisations and specific requirements and systems need to be in place to ensure that email can be managed.

This guide provides a checklist against which an existing or new business system may be assessed to determine:

• whether the business the system supports is subject to any recordkeeping requirements
• how well the business system is currently functioning  or will function as a recordkeeping system
• what action may be required to enable the business system to meet recordkeeping requirements.

Records systems have characteristics and functionalities which provide controls to support the creation, capture and management of authentic, accurate, complete, unaltered and useable records.

This guidance provides strategies for public offices to consider when configuring Microsoft 365. To achieve compliance with the Standard on Records Management and the State Records Act 1998, public offices will need to assess Microsoft 365 with the business systems checklist.

The strategies provided are not exhaustive and current at the time of publication of this advice. 

We recommend NSW public offices to use this guidance in assessing or understanding the records and information management capabilities of existing or future Microsoft 365 environment.