Records management, or RM, is the practice of maintaining the records of an organization from the time they are created up to their eventual disposal. A record can be either tangible in the form of papers, notepads and etc. or intangible like electronic data. In either of these forms of record, managing has always been a complex task.
Well it’s not anymore as SharePoint 2010 provides you and your organization with a framework which is capable of:
- Determines what kinds of information should be considered records.
- Determines how active documents that will become records should be handled while they are being used, and determines how they should be collected after they are declared to be records.
- Determines in what manner and for how long each record type should be retained to meet legal, business, or regulatory requirements.
- Researches and implements technological solutions and business processes to help ensure that the organization complies with its records management obligations in a cost-effective and non-intrusive way.
- Performs records-related tasks such as disposing of expired records or locating and protecting records that are related to external events such as lawsuits.
Reference: Elements of a records management system
In this article, we will briefly discuss how to create a Record Center and how to apply a retention policy.
To create a Record Center, select the template “Record Center”
Once done, go to the site which you have just created.
Make sure you activate the “In place Records Management”. To do this go to site action->Site Settings. Under Site Collection administration open Site collection Features. Finally from the list of available features, activate “In Place Record Management”.
Till this point, we have created our Record Center Site and from the features we have enabled the In Place Record Management feature. The next step is to define the settings for Record Center. These settings include the definition of Content type, creating a document library (which we have already done before) and few others.
Now it’s time for us to create a Retention Policy. The retention policy is where you have to define when and how you want to declare ‘content’ as record. In our case, we will declare our content as Record if they are 7 year old.
To define a retention policy, go to your document library and the library settings. Select “Information Management policy settings” than select the folder on which you want to define your retention policy.
