In Chapter 4, List Management and Chapter 5, Library Management, we discussed SharePoint's functionality in adding content to Lists and Libraries, and how Content Types provide reusable functionality within a site; and in Chapter 8, Managing Metadata, we discussed how to add document-bound information such as metadata, taxonomies, and folksonomies to documents and list items. While these chapters relate to adding and managing, this chapter discusses SharePoint's functionality in managing content with procedures to ensure accurate, up-to-date, and compliant content.
In this chapter, we will cover:
Record Management and Information Management functionality is not available with SharePoint Foundation, and if you are creating Record Management or policies, you will need Site collection permissions.
Record Management is the practice of maintaining and tracking records within an organization. This process is normally determined based on an organization's internal and external legal compliance requirements. Generally, regulated industries such as financial and health care services require some form of record management, and the larger the organization, the greater the record management requirements. The consequences of the information not being accurate, up-to-date, or available are dire.
In a nutshell, record management involves establishing a record, setting policies and procedures, and auditing the records.
SharePoint 2010's Record Management allows In-Place Records management, which is the ability to declare the document as a record, and it will be viewed as a record in the site it was created in. In SharePoint 2007, the document had to reside in the specific Record Center site template for policies to be applied. The Record Center Site was introduced to you in Chapter 3, SharePoint Team Sites. After the document is declared as a record, it can have different policies and restrictions from when it was a document.
Records and documents (a non-policy item) can now reside side-by-side, in the same library they were created in with different policies such as retention or deletion schedules applied to individual items.
Records are both documents and list items and can be declared as records either manually or automatically. This includes wiki pages, blog posts, and article pages. Organizations are increasingly using SharePoint to communicate company policies and other important information such as health and safety that could be time-sensitive.
Applying Record Management to these items improves the value of the contents as content owners can be notified when content is due to expire, or the contents can be unpublished. When content is perceived to be out-of-date or static on a SharePoint portal, the user base can lose confidence in its accuracy. Record Management can prevent this happening.
Policies can be added to a Content Type, Library/List, or Folder.
Manual record declaration can be configured on Site Collection level and overridden in each document library.
In SharePoint 2007, Record Management functionality was only in the Record Center of a Site collection. With SharePoint 2010, In-Place Records Management can be in any site. This is beneficial as its functionality is available to be used by more users. However, from a compliance standpoint, it is important to know where these policies are being used.
The first step with record management is to create a record. This should be created at the site collection level, and just like security inheritance, the record can be applied to sites and sub sites.
To configure a site collection for records, the In-Place record management needs to be enabled. Once this is done, follow these steps:
This selection specifies the kind of restrictions that will be placed on an item when it is declared a record. This setting does not affect items already declared as records.
The options in this section let you define for the entire site collection whether or not the Declare Record and Undeclare Record buttons appear on the Ribbon. If the buttons appear on the Ribbon, only users with the proper permissions can declare a document as a record. Each list or library has its own Record Declaration Settings page that allows them to break off from the site collection setting to show or hide the records declaration buttons on the Ribbon.
If record declaration settings are not set at the list or library level, they will use the site collection setting by default.
The types of users are:
You can also configure lists and libraries so that all items added to them will automatically be declared as records.
To configure in-place records management for a list or library, follow these steps:
To apply a record manually, these steps need to be applied:
There is now a column called Declared Record, which denotes the date and time of when the document or item becomes a record.
To undeclare a record:
If this menu is disabled, the document library is set to automatic declaration mode. This will need to be deselected.
By the menu being on a document, users can see if an item is a record and if other policies are associated with it.