Sharepoint 2010 : Administering Enterprise Content Management - Document Management (part 9) - Improved Records Center Site

1.15 Records Management and Upfront Preparation

In developing the new records management capabilities included with SharePoint 2010, the team at Microsoft defined three core design tenets for this release.

• Integrated governance

• Familiar and easy to use

• Flexible

Integrated governance translates into a records management experience that is tightly bound to the collaboration experience and that works on a variety of SharePoint objects. Microsoft wanted to create a system that was familiar and easy to use by finding a balance between feature richness and user freedom, and they wanted to find a solution that was extremely flexible and configurable to an organization’s needs.

In keeping with these tenets, there are many ways to realize compliance goals, discoverability, and retention within SharePoint 2010. New features allow for the records management experience to be as absent or present as you deem necessary. You even have multiple options to control where you keep records and how they are processed.

The key to success with records management is to perform the upfront preparation needed to ensure you have everything required from a design standpoint. Records management starts with collaboration. If you don’t think about how you want to handle record content from its inception, you will always find that you need to locate content that you cannot find, have inadvertently removed content that you needed to keep, or have retained content that you should have disposed of.

When deciding how to manage record content within SharePoint 2010, you have the following options.

• Manage records in a dedicated Records Center archive

• Manage records in place, wherever they are stored

• Use a hybrid approach of in-place and archival management

When determining which option is best for your purposes, you should evaluate the following considerations. It’s important to think about each of these issues carefully to ensure that storing records alongside active documents will work in your environment.

• Sufficient governance in collaboration sites

• Regulatory requirements for compliance

• Backup schedule (of collaboration content databases)

• Collaboration site life cycle (and usage duration)

• Necessity of collaboration site users to have access to records

• Records manager scope of responsibility (records only, or active documents as well)

1.16 Records Management Features

Table 13 provides a summary of the features that are available for enabling records management functionality with sites. Note that not all of these features are used exclusively for records management, and many of them have already been covered in detail elsewhere. They are listed here because when these features are used together, they enable comprehensive records management capability within any site. You may choose to employ all of these features within a site, or you may want to use only the ones necessary to meet your requirements. When you create a Records Center site, all of these features will be activated by default.

Table 13. Records Management Features

FEATURE	LEVEL	EXPLANATION
Disposition Approval Workflow	Site Collection	Manages document expiration and retention by allowing participants to decide whether to retain or delete expired documents.
Document ID Service	Site Collection	Assigns IDs to documents in the site collection that can be used to retrieve items independent of their current location.
Document Sets	Site Collection	Provides the content types required for creating and using document sets. You create a document set when you want to manage multiple documents as a single work product.
In-Place Records Management	Site Collection	Enables the definition and declaration of records in place.
Library and Folder Based Retention	Site Collection	Allows list administrators to override content type retention schedules and set schedules on libraries and folders.
Content Organizer	Site	Creates metadata-based rules that move content submitted to this site to the correct library or folder.
E-mail Integration with Content Organizer	Site	Enable a site’s Content Organizer to accept and organize e-mail messages. This feature should be used only in a highly managed store such as a Records Center.
Hold and eDiscovery	Site	Tracks external actions like litigations, investigations, or audits that require you to suspend the disposition of documents.
Metadata Navigation and Filtering	Site	Provides each list in the site with a settings page for configuring that list to use metadata tree view hierarchies and filter controls to improve navigation and filtering of the contained items.

1.17 Improved Records Center Site

The Records Center site template has been functionally improved and streamlined for a better user experience in SharePoint 2010. In addition to including all of the features described in the previous section, the Records Center now has a new clean look and layout. Central to the Welcome page, shown in Figure 23, is a very prominent Submit A Record button, which allows a user to upload a new record quickly and easily.

Figure 23. The Welcome page of the improved Records Center site

The site comes with two libraries. The first is the Drop Off Library, which is a special library created by the Content Organizer. The movement of content added to this library is controlled by the defined Content Organizer rules. These rules can specify content type and property conditions that must be met to have the content automatically organized.

The other library you will notice is the Record Library. You will upload finished documents to this library. Documents added to this library will automatically be declared as records. Additionally, you may use the metadata navigation feature to make this library easier to manage.

From the Site Actions menu of a Records Center site, you can access a special Manage Records Center menu item. The Manage Records Center page gives you one-click access to all of the activities you will need to set up your Records Center site for records management, as shown in Figure 24.

Figure 24. The Manage Records Center page

The new Records Center site simply brings together all of the features needed to perform records management in SharePoint 2010.