Chapter 21
Managing Content and the Content Lifecycle
IN THIS CHAPTER
Checking in and out content
Enabling content approval
Understanding how approvals can work with workflow
Building out a Records Management site
SharePoint has always been an excellent platform for managing content. The good news is that Microsoft didn’t make the mistake of taking a great thing and changing it. It left the content management systems in SharePoint mostly alone and fine-tuned them with bug fixes and smoother interfaces.
In this chapter, you learn about the basics of managing content, such as checking a file out and checking it back in, and get a feel for content approval workflows. You explore the records management functionality in SharePoint and discover how to define terms, create information management policies, and set up a site based on the Records Center template. Finally, this chapter covers some of the finer points of records management, such as using the Content Organizer tool and placing holds on content.
Checking a Document In and Out
A document library is just like any library — it holds a collection of artifacts (in this case, documents). Much like we check out books from a library and check them back in when we are done with them, checking out a document in SharePoint allows the user to make changes to the document without running the risk of someone else working on the document at the same time. When a user is done making changes, checking the document in allows others to do the same. The document check-in and check-out feature is a great way to keep track of and control how content is updated.
The ribbon displays many of the same document actions as the ellipsis menu next to each file. This is a common theme in SharePoint. There are often multiple ways to achieve the exact same outcome. To check out a document using the ribbon:
In your app, select the circle (left-most column) next to the document you want to check out.
Alternatively, you can click the ellipsis next to the document itself and find a Check Out link in the More fly-out menu. This saves you from having to click to select the document first and then going up to the ribbon.
- Click the ellipsis in the ribbon and click the Check Out button, as shown in Figure 21-1.
Click OK at the confirmation prompt.
The document is checked out, and a small green checked-out arrow appears on the document icons.
FIGURE 21-1: Checking out a document in SharePoint.
SharePoint used to have a feature that allows you to check out multiple documents at the same time. Microsoft has said they plan to bring that feature to SharePoint Online in the 2019 calendar year. Judging from the comments at https://sharepoint.uservoice.com (the site Microsoft uses to collect feedback on SharePoint), the community is anxious for this feature. Checking in and out multiple documents is something we do fairly often, and we can’t wait to be able to do it in SharePoint Online!
You may be thinking, “That’s great, but why would I want to check out a document?” To us, checking out — and its counterpart, checking in — is just good document editing etiquette. What better way to let others know that you’re making changes to a document than by checking it out? Checking out a document sets the Checked Out flag to Yes and stores the name of the person who checked out the document. Of course, always remember to check in documents when your edits are complete.
An app can be configured to force a person to check out a document before it can be edited. This is achieved on the Versioning Settings page located in the Library Settings.
Documents that are checked out show an arrow in the document type icon. As shown in Figure 21-2, the “Important Work” Excel file is checked out (it has a green check-out icon in the shape of an arrow next to it), whereas the rest of the files are not checked out.
FIGURE 21-2: A checked-out document shows a check-out arrow.
If you want to see who has a document checked out, you have to look at the Checked Out To column in the app view. This column is displayed by default. You can customize views and rearrange columns. (We discuss working with views in Chapter 13.)
To check in a document after you’re done making your changes, repeat the steps you followed earlier in this section to check out the document, only in Step 2, choose the Check In option from the menu. You are asked to provide a comment and choose if you want to retain the check-out after you check in the document. This is because you might want to check in a document as you are working on it and pass a milestone. Think of a check-in as a snapshot of the document at that state. You can use the Files tab of the ribbon to check in documents as well.
If you change your mind and want to pretend that the check-out never happened, you can click the Discard Check Out button instead of checking in the document. This can be useful if you accidentally checked out the wrong document or made changes that you wish you wouldn’t have made. When you discard the check out, the document reverts to the state it was in before you checked it out.
Configuring Content Approval
Trust, but verify: Sometimes you want to let folks add a document or create an item in an app but you don’t want those items unleashed on an unsuspecting world before someone approves them. SharePoint has a few ways to help you enact and enforce content governance policies to define what gets published and under what conditions, how many revisions are retained, and how they’re secured and tracked. Depending on the complexity of your approval process, you can use the standard content approval option, or you can create a more sophisticated — and custom — approval workflow. Using Microsoft Flow to create custom workflows to approve documents and items is discussed in Chapter 14.
Content approval is approval-light; it’s a publishing function that you turn on or off at the app level, and it has just a handful of configuration settings. Content approval — also called moderation — doesn't include item routing or notifications, and it doesn’t facilitate reviews and commenting. Content approval just ensures that drafts and new uploaded content don’t get published to your app until someone with some authority says it’s okay. The content approval process controls who can see those documents until they’re approved.
Content approval also can specify (in the case of documents) whether items must be checked out before they can be edited. And content approval can hide draft documents from everyone except the item author and those users with approve permissions on the app. (Contrast this with draft item security on apps without content approval enabled in which you can limit views only to users with app-level Read permissions or users with app-level Edit permissions.)
This is a subtle distinction, but specifying that only the item author and users with approve permissions can view items means that the author can check in an item without exposing it to the view of other readers or editors until it’s formally published and approved. We find this useful in cases when we have multiple authorized contributors to an app and we want to keep them from seeing each other’s work until someone (the approver) says it’s okay. This also gives me a way to let authors work on drafts without readers looking over their shoulders. (Few things are more frustrating than editorial feedback on something you’re still working on!)
Turning on content approval
By default, content approval is turned off and (usually) any user with Read access can see Draft items in most apps. Sites created with the publishing site template, however, already have content approval turned on in the Pages app.
To turn on and configure content approval, follow these steps:
Navigate to your app’s Settings page (Library Settings or List Settings) and click the Versioning Settings link.
The Versioning Settings page appears. Remember, you can find your apps Library Settings or List Settings page by first navigating to the app and then clicking the Settings gear icon in the top-right corner of the screen and clicking List Settings or Library Settings.
Select the Yes radio button below Require Content Approval for Submitted Items.
You see options to retain versions, specify who can see drafts, and in library-based apps — document check-out options.
Notice that the options below Who Should See Draft Items in This Document Library switches to the Only Users Who Can Approve Items (And the Author of the Item) option as soon as you select the Yes radio button to require content approval for submitted items, as shown in Figure 21-3.
You need to decide whether readers, editors, or only authors and approvers can see drafts. We usually enable content approval partly because we don’t want to expose items to just anyone before they meet some level of credibility or done-ness. So we select the Only Users Who Can Approve Items (And the Author of the Item) option.
Verify the Document Version History settings in the Document Version History section.
You can specify versions without turning on content approval. A major version is created when you publish a document and a minor version is created when you save a document. You can configure which level of detail you want to set in versioning by choosing None, Major, or Major and Minor.
Click a Draft Item Security option in the Draft Item Security section.
The security referred to by draft item security — Read, Edit, and Approve — maps to SharePoint’s Visitors, Members, and Approvers groups. (See Chapter 20 for details on managing security groups.)- Click a check-out option in the Require Check Out section.
Click OK to save your changes.
You return to the Library Settings or List Settings page whence you came. The items created in (or changed in) the app are subject to approval (unless you disable content approval later).
FIGURE 21-3: The Draft Item Security settings change after you select Yes under Require Content Approval for Submitted Items.
If content approval is active, when users add an item to the app, they see a note that items require content approval in the item properties window. After the item is added, it appears in Pending status in the app view until it is approved.
Identifying approvers
You need to specify who the approvers include, generally by adding users to the created Approvers group. (See Chapter 20 for information about groups and permissions.)
Oh, and by the way, content approval isn’t just about Big Brother checking someone else’s work. You may want to ensure that documents can be checked in and versioned, but that they aren’t displayed to readers until they’re formally approved. In these cases, you set the same person or people both to create and to approve items. That way, all people in the group can see the item’s current version, but the rest of the organization can’t see it until it has been approved by someone in the group.
Casting an approving eye
In an app that has approval turned on, when a new document is created and a major version is published, the approval status is marked Pending (Figure 21-4) and designated approvers can approve, pend, or reject the item by clicking the ellipsis next to the document and choosing Approve/Reject from the More flyout menu, as shown in Figure 21-5.
FIGURE 21-4: The new document is in Pending status until approved.
FIGURE 21-5: Opening the dialog to approve a new document.
When you select Approve/Reject, you’re presented with the aptly named Approve/Reject page, as shown in Figure 21-6, with the Pending option selected by default. At this point, you can leave a comment in the Comment text box but leave the item as Pending or you can select the Approved or the Rejected option to approve or reject the item with or without comment. (Rejecting without comment is pretty poor form, though.) The action, name of the person who took the action, and timestamp are recorded in the item’s version history.
FIGURE 21-6: The Approve/Reject window.
Unless alerts are enabled on the app or the item itself, the item originator won’t know you’ve taken an action until the next time that person is in the app and checks the approval status on the item. We recommend using alerts with content approval unless you have some alternative process where approvers make it part of their daily routine to check for pending items.
Disapproving: Not just for stern parents
Everyone wants approval, but sometimes you don’t get it. Sometimes an approver rejects an item. When this happens, the item is changed to Rejected status, and then it’s visible only to the author and anyone with permission to manage the app.
When you first enable content approval on an app, all existing items are approved automatically.
Getting alerts on approval/rejection status
When an item is marked Pending with content approval turned on (and no associated approval workflow), that item just sits there, marinating in its own pending status until someone notices and either approves or rejects it. When the app we’re managing sees a lot of traffic, we rely on the approvers to check for pending items because they’re working in the app all the time anyway. But another way to make sure approvers get the heads-up is to set alerts (see Chapter 10). In addition to alerts, you can create a workflow that periodically emails a person or group until an item is approved. We have found this constant nagging type behavior is actually very effective, and people appreciate it because they don’t have to remember to do something. (Approving content with a Microsoft Flow workflow is covered in Chapter 14.)
If you turn off content approval, be aware that pending and rejected items, which were hidden from public view, are now viewable. We recommend resolving all draft, pending, and rejected items before disabling content approval; it’s a dirty trick to reveal someone’s draft to the world when she isn’t expecting it!
Digging into a SharePoint Records Center
In SharePoint, the Records Center is a useful and powerful tool for declaring holds and managing records. First, it’s metadata-driven, which means that all policies for automatic declaration, retention, and disposition can be based on metadata. Second, it’s capable of hierarchical archiving, meaning that each level or folder where documents are routed, based on their metadata, can inherit from its parent or have separate policies. Third, you can manage the entire lifecycle of the document in a single policy, from declaration through disposition. Fourth, administrators can allow users to declare records outside of the official Records Center, allowing records to be kept where they are actively being accessed and updated.
Defining the terms
SharePoint provides many records management features, including the Managed Metadata Service, Content Types, Content Organizer, Policies, Document Sets, and the Records Management site template. The following list is a quick guide to these terms and what functionality they provide:
- Managed Metadata ensures a common vocabulary and a central place for terminology used in your company, which can be managed centrally or by departments.
- Content Types scale across the enterprise with SharePoint and are not limited to each site collection. This means you have a much more scalable way of controlling and managing the types of content people can create, the metadata on those content types, and the information policies associated with them.
- Content Organizer enables you to take routing documents and content beyond content types. You can create rules based on one or more pieces of metadata on the content. Essentially, this simplifies routing from the user’s perspective, and content gets routed to the right place without too much forethought.
- Information Management Policies can be applied to the content type or the location of the content, which can become part of the policy. You can expire record and non-record content in the same policy.
- Document Sets allow you to group together multiple documents into a single set. This helps keep track of all the documents you might use for a particular idea or task. For example, you might want to group all of the documents for a proposal that multiple people are working on.
- Records Management Site Template is a SharePoint site template that has most of the records management capabilities of SharePoint already included and ready to use. You can use this site template to get up and running with managing records in SharePoint with very little configuration overhead.
With these features, declaring records, holds, and policies is scalable and powerful in SharePoint.
Creating information management policies
Here are four different types of policies that you can set up in a single information management policy:
- A Retention policy enables you to manage how items, documents, team mailboxes, and sites are stored on the server and what happens to them after the retention stage expires. A simple example of this would be that if a document has not been modified in one year, its version history is deleted.
- An Auditing policy enables you to track what happens to an item at particular stages as an item is being moved or copied, opened, downloaded, viewed, checked in and out, and deleted and restored, so you have a full history of who has done what to an item.
- A Barcodes policy assigns a barcode to each item, allowing you to incorporate the barcode into your tracking of the item. You can optionally specify that you want users to insert a barcode before saving or printing.
- A Labels policy allows you to insert important and contextual information about the document when it is printed.
As shown in Figure 21-7, all these policies can be part of a single information management policy.
FIGURE 21-7: Creating a new information management policy.
To create a new information management policy, you can start from an app or content type. Content type retention policies are the most powerful because they scale across the farm, but for the purposes of this example, we stick to a retention policy in a Library app. (If you want to follow along with a content type, simply browse to that content type in the site collection’s Site Content Types gallery.)
Site collection administrators can turn off this feature of allowing app-based retention policies.
Follow these steps to create a new information management policy:
- From the app settings page (Library Settings or List Settings), or from the content type’s properties, click the Information Management Policy Settings link, as shown in Figure 21-8.
Click either the item or the folder; if you’re on the content type, you don’t have to do anything.
For Document Library apps, you can have the policy inherit from the content type, or you can choose to create a new policy just for the app.
These policy pages look a bit different if you’re using a List-based app or a list content type because you don’t have as much to manage, but they have the same essential functionality.After you’re on the policy settings page (refer to Figure 21-7), give the policy a description and a statement by typing in the Administrative Description and Policy Statement text boxes, respectively, and then click Enable Retention.
We just talk about retention here because it’s the most interesting, and the other policy settings are straightforward.
After you select Enable Retention, you see some extra information, a link, and some options. For Document Library apps, you can treat non-records and records the same way if you choose, or different stages for handling records. Whichever you choose, you should define at least one retention stage for either records, non-records, or both.
If you don’t define a stage, the retention policy will not do anything.Click the Add a Retention Stage link in the new section that appears after you enable retention.
A dialog box appears, shown in Figure 21-9, that has a couple of different options.
Choose the event that triggers the retention by selecting the This Stage Is Based Off a Date Property on the Item radio button, select an option from the Time Period drop-down list, and enter a number and select Years, Months, or Days from the drop-down list.
From the Time Period drop-down list, you can select Created, Modified, or Declared Record. This determines the amount of time the stage lasts.
In the Action section, select an option from the When This Stage Is Triggered, Perform the Following Action drop-down list.
You can choose from a variety of actions:
- Move to Recycle Bin
- Permanently Delete
- Transfer to Another Location
- Start a Workflow
- Skip to the Next Stage
- Declare Record
- Delete Previous Drafts
- Delete all Previous Versions
You can also set the action to recur, but this depends on the action you’ve specified previously. You can’t, for example, keep deleting the same document over and over again, but you can keep purging previous drafts or all previous versions until the next stage is active.
- Click OK to close the dialog box, and then click OK again to save the policy.
FIGURE 21-8: Selecting the Information Management Policy Settings link.
FIGURE 21-9: Adding a retention stage.
So what does this all have to do with archiving and records management, you may wonder? Retention policies (and the other types of information management policies you can create in SharePoint) provide a direct way of managing records and non-records alike and give you a lot more control over the who, what, when, why, and how of documents, items, and content types stored in your SharePoint site. In fact, one of those retention policy actions is Transfer to Another Location, and that location can be a Records Center.
Setting Up a Records Center
A Records Center is a special type of SharePoint site template. Using a site based on the Records Center template, you can
- Have more than one Records Center in your farm
- Move a document to the Records Center instead of creating a copy, and put a link in the old location that points to the new location in the Records Center
- Route more intelligently based on content or item properties
- Have better control over the naming of the folders when items are routed to the Records Center
- Allow users to create records in place and not have to use the Records Center at all
With all these improvements, it’s time to create a Records Center and start setting it up. Because a Records Center is a site template, you simply create a new site based on that template. (Refer to Chapter 5 for more information on how to create a new site.)
After you have created a Records Center, your home page will look similar to Figure 21-10.
FIGURE 21-10: The Records Center home page.
Click the Settings gear icon and choose Manage Records Center. On this new page, you see a lot of information to help you set up your Records Center. Read the steps about tasks and file plans because those are much like standard SharePoint functionality, such as creating Library apps, looking at and/or creating content types, and designing the home page. We talk about Content Organizer rules in the next section.
You can set up Send To links in Central Administration for users to send documents to a Records Center. In the Action section of the Stage Properties dialog box, you specify three options: Copy, Move, and Move and Leave a Link.
Using the Content Organizer
The Content Organizer, and specifically the rules that it manages, is where all the intelligence happens in the Records Center. Rules allow you to control where records go after they are submitted to the Records Center and what properties those items have. The absolute best thing about the Content Organizer is that it allows users not to have to think about their own content — they just declare it a record and their job is done.
Figure 21-11 shows the Content Organizer rules page. You get to this page by clicking the Add Item link in the Content Organizer Rules list. (You navigate to this page by clicking the Settings gear icon and choosing Manage Records Center.)
FIGURE 21-11: The Content Organizer rules page.
Clicking the New button will take you to the page to create a new rule.
A rule has five different categories — Rule Name, Rule Status and Priority, Submission’s Content Type, Conditions, and Target Location. Rule Name and Rule Status and Priority are self-explanatory, so we focus on explaining the other categories.
Submission’s Content Type may seem simple, but it has the ability to make matches across multiple content type names, so you can check the This Content Type Has Alternate Names in Other Sites check box and add those names to the list. What’s really powerful here is that you can specify the catch-all asterisk (*) and sweep up all the content types based on the base content type for this rule. For example, you might want to include the rule for all legal-based content types that might have multiple names. You might have content types called Legal Documents, Briefs, and Cases. All of these are legal-based content types and should be included.
Conditions allow you to devise some logic based on the properties of the item submitted. Take the Picture content type, for example. You can choose from one of the properties of the content type, such as Date Picture Taken, and set the condition to a date at the end of last year, so all pictures can be moved to a location based on when they were taken.
Also notice you can have multiple conditions by clicking the Add Another Condition link. So you could have a rule that routes pictures taken during the 2019 or 2020 calendar year.
Target Location, the last item for your new rule, is where you want to send these items. Remember that these rules are run on items that are submitted to the Records Center. So items are held in the Drop Off Library until the Content Organizer has a chance to evaluate the content based on the rules set up for the Records Center. That’s a long-winded way of asking, where do you want these documents to go?
You can specify another site that has a Content Organizer configured, or you can route the items that meet the conditions to a Library app in the Records Center itself. You can also have the Content Organizer group items with the same properties together in the same folder, and you have control over the name of that folder. Based on a property of the content type, the folder name includes, by default, the name of the property and its value. So if, for example, you had a custom picture content type that included the employee’s department name, and the column on the content type was called Dept, your folder would be named Dept — Claims Adjusters if the user worked in the Claims Adjusters department.
Having (or creating) the right columns on the content types that you want to manage is critical for getting the rules to function the way you need them to. So spend some extra effort to identify and get the right content types in place for your important documents and files. Not only will it help you maintain some sort of control over how content is created, but it also helps you establish good policies for organizing your records.
Managing Records in Place
In the effort to make records management more flexible, SharePoint supports managing records outside the Records Center, on any document and on any site. The In Place Records Management feature must be activated at the site collection level. After it is, each list-based or library-based app gets a Record Declaration Settings link on the app settings page. As shown in Figure 21-12, the settings on this page enable you to control whether and how records are declared, and you can even declare records automatically as items are added to the Document Library app (not that this feature is used very often).
FIGURE 21-12: Controlling in-place records declaration.
The Automatically Declare Items as Records When They Are Added to This List option is selected by default. This causes the Manual Record Declaration Activity option to be disabled until you change the selected option.
If records are allowed to be declared in the Library app, you click the ellipsis for the document, click the second ellipsis, and then select Compliance Details from the Advanced menu, as shown in Figure 21-13. The Compliance Details dialog box includes a link to declare the document as a record if records are allowed to be declared in the app. Clicking it shows a warning about locking down the item for editing. After you click OK, it makes it a record. Users can revert a record to a document from this same dialog box, and if anyone tries to edit the document while it’s a record, they receive an error message saying that it’s checked out by the system account.
FIGURE 21-13: Declaring a record in-place.
The powerful feature of in-place records management is that it keeps the documents available for users to reference without taking them out of the context of the app and site where they were originally created. But the record still shows up on records reports and can be managed centrally.
Placing Records on Litigation Hold
After you have all these retention policies and records being managed based on rules, you may have to temporarily suspend these policies. This is typically due to pending litigation where records matching certain criteria must be preserved until the litigation or court matter is settled.
The first thing you have to do is create the hold. You can do this in the Records Center, or you can do it at the site collection level. Figure 21-14 shows the Hold section of the Site Settings page for a Records Center site. Holds are easy to create and need a title, description, and an owner. Make sure to create at least one of these for each litigation or court matter that is required.
FIGURE 21-14: Managing holds and eDiscovery at the site collection level.
The more interesting part is the Discover and Hold Content link. As shown in Figure 21-15, there are a few different parts to discovering content to put on hold. The first one, Search Criteria, allows you to select a site and enter search terms much the same way that you regularly search for content in SharePoint. Click Preview Results after typing in one or more terms to see the results in a new window.
FIGURE 21-15: Configuring eDiscovery and placing items on hold.
After you have your search terms down, you can choose whether you want the items that come back in the search results to be kept in place and added to a local hold or copied to another location. If you choose another location, most likely that will be the Records Center site, which might be the best way to put items on hold without alerting users.
The last thing you need to specify is the hold that you’re going to put the records in. This ensures that the documents do not expire or do not otherwise get altered due to an information management policy, and it also ensures that users can’t “accidentally” delete the items.