Guest Author: Michal Pisarek

There has been a lot of talk within the SharePoint community in regards to the new Enterprise Content Management (ECM) features in SharePoint 2010.

Records Management had some weaknesses in MOSS 2007 which caused many customers reluctance in adopting the platform to truly manage content from creation through to disposition.

Fortunately in SharePoint 2010 there has been a significant investment in the Records Management aspects of the platform. Microsoft has listened to the user community and enhanced the functionality within the platform to support the creation of a full-fledged Records Management solution including:

1. Support for multi-stage disposition rules
2. Centralized management and syndication of Content Types
3. Unique persistent document numbering across the entire lifecycle of content
4. Complex routing rules to support hierarchical file plans
5. Reporting across Sites and Site Collections for compliance details
6. The ability to mix records and non-records within the same location

In this series of articles I am going to explain the process that we have gone through in creating a Records Management solution for clients using strictly out of the box configuration within SharePoint 2010. This series will provide an end to end overview of the kinds of decisions and considerations that we have made for our clients and will hopefully raise some questions from the user community about SharePoint and Records Management.

I also will be pretty honest in my findings! I am a true fan of SharePoint and love the new Records Management functionality but is it perfect? Of course not, however with some know how, configuration and planning you can build a robust, scalable solution that can really create value for your organization. I see SharePoint 2010 Records Management as a mid-market offering providing fantastic value while allowing an organization to manage their entire content life-cycle from a single, unified platform.

Our Goal

So before we start what are we trying to actually build? Well here is our very simplified version of our own endusersharepoint Records Management implementation:

1. A Records Centre with a full hierarchical file plan with disposition rules defined at each node
2. Centrally defined content types with retention policies and metadata attached
3. The ability for users to manually declare items as records but also for items to be automatically declared as records if certain criteria are met
4. A way to report on which content is in which stage of the disposition life-cycle.
5. Unique document numbering that is persistent across the full life-cycle of the content
6. The ability to declare any content as a Record, be it a document, list item or Document Set

Keep in mind that this is all out of the box configuration; there is absolutely no code at all! In some instances I have been a little creative and much more can be done if we layer custom code on top of our solution. But this is an example of how powerful configuration can be in SharePoint 2010.

Our Scenario

EUSP Catering Co. is a company that sells catering services. They contain a number of departments that use both collaboration sites to plan and coordinate events, in addition to less process driven sites such as document centers. When a new event is sold a collaboration site is created and all information is stored within the site. When items become records (such as contracts, menus, agreements and vendor receipts) they are either sent to a Records Center (in the case of financial information) or declared in place (in the case of discussions, tasks and other items).

The content goes through various retention rules dependent on the type of content. EUSP Catering Co. wants to reduce storage costs so a conscious effort is made to move content to cheaper storage after 3 years, and to destroy content after 7 years. In addition they wanted an easy way for employees to be able to declare contents as records, to be able to search for records and to ensure that no tampering of records has occurred.

Stay tuned as we begin the journey with EUSP Catering Co. to see if we can accomplish their goals and satisfy their business needs!

So where to from here? Well in the next article I will show the new features within SharePoint 2010 that will allow us to build our Records Management system including some tips on which features will provide instant benefit to any SharePoint implementation.

Guest Author: Michal Pisarek

Michal Pisarek is a solution specialist for Habañero Consulting Group, a Microsoft Gold Partner in beautiful Vancouver Canada. He has been working with SharePoint for 3 years and has a passion for finding the right balance between technology, innovation, governance and fun to meet his client’s needs.

You can find other articles by Michal on his blog SharePointAnalystHQ or follow him on Twitter (@michalpisarek)