Get Classified with FCI (File Classification Infrastructure) in Windows Server 2008 R2.
One of the challenges facing many organizations today is how to organize all of your data. Do you use a complex list of folders to really organize all of your data? How easy is that to maintain or for your users to leverage? Well Windows Server 2008 R2 is here to help with FCI, File Classification Infrastructure.
FCI allows you leverage your business taxonomy for organizing your data. I know many spent the lengthy process to create your taxonomy to provide the definitions for key data in your environments. In most cases this was probably a long and tedious process, which in some cases may have had very little impact on your environment.
FCI includes the ability to define classification properties, automatically classify files based on location and content, invoke file management tasks such as file expiration and custom commands based on classification, and produce reports that show the distribution of a classification property on the file server. In other words you can now leverage your business taxonomy and start collaboration for your users!
FCI will also allow you to do this automatically. FCI is built-in. It’s included in Windows Server 2008 R2. And out-of-the-box you get support for many typical scenarios. It will help you organize data. If you are using metadata effectively, FCI can help with many scenarios.
- Organize items with specific values into areas that make sense to your project teams,
- Moving or securing sensitive, confidential, or personal files into an encrypted location
- Create copies of certain files automatically for the sake of creating a backup.
These are just some of the problems FCI is can help you to solve. Think of FCI as a process that can automatically apply metadata to files based on their content and the ability to do something with those files based on that classification.
Another part of this solution is that we’ve created and published an API for this functionality, so that other companies (perhaps yours) can also build solutions using these tools. Your applications might be able to benefit from getting FCI classifications, or setting them into files based on the needs of your own application.
And one early goal of this solution is also to add value to Windows SharePoint. SharePoint can see, and workflows can take advantage of, data coming from FCI.
Here are some resources for you to get up to speed on FCI, so get classified with FCI in Windows Server 2008 R2:
