You can control the use of the four information
management policies—retention, auditing, barcodes, and labels—at the
farm level using Central Administration. Any of these settings can be
decommissioned at the SharePoint farm level using the interface shown in
Figure 1.
You access these settings using the Security category within Central
Administration. If one of these settings has been decommissioned at the
farm level, you will not be able to implement or configure that setting
anywhere in the farm.
If you click any of the four policy features displayed here, you will have two options for configuring the feature:
The barcodes policy feature
has one additional configuration option that you can configure here.
You can configure barcodes to include letters when SharePoint generates
these barcodes. By default, the barcodes generated by SharePoint only
contain numbers, but you can change this setting by clicking Barcodes
and selecting the Letters (A-Z) And Numbers (0-9) option under Include
The Following Characters In Barcodes, as shown in Figure 2.
When you are ready to create
an information management policy, the configuration is the same
regardless of whether you are applying the policy to a content type,
list, or library. You have to provide similar general information for
each policy. This includes a name for the policy and an administrative
description (Figure 3), which is seen by list managers when configuring
information management policy. You must also supply a brief description
that is displayed to the users when they access items that are
associated with the information management policy. This can be used to
notify them of any special processes as well as the settings of the
policy.
1. Defining a Retention Policy
A retention policy allows
you to specify how long a document will be retained and what will happen
to the document throughout its life cycle. This is achieved by defining
stages in its life cycle that occur sequentially. Additional stages can
be added to the retention schedule in SharePoint, allowing you to
manage entire life cycles from within SharePoint. After selecting the
Enable Retention Policy Feature check box, you are required to click the
Add A Retention Stage link to display the retention configuration
options shown in Figure 4.
There are
retention configuration options available for each stage of a document’s
life cycle, and you can use the retention configuration options to
configure the following three properties.
Event Specify the event that activates the stage based on a date property
Action Specify the action that takes place during that stage
Recurrence Optionally, force the action to occur repeatedly
The activation of an event is
driven by a date property on the item or a custom event formula located
on the server. You can use any of the SharePoint default date properties
or a custom date property.
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In SharePoint 2010, you have the
option to set an expiration time based on any date property available
in the drop-down list shown in Figure 8-5,
including when it was declared a record. You can specify values between
0 to 500 years, 0 to 6000 months, or 0 to 182,500 days from the date
selected from the drop-down list. In reality, all three settings have
the same maximum amount of time, so your choice of which to select is
really based on how precise you want the date setting to be. Selecting
days will give you a more precise setting than months, and months will
be more precise than years. The precision of the retention period
required by your organization should be determined by your legal team.
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Next you choose one of the following actions to be performed during the stage of the retention policy you are configuring.
Move To Recycle Bin Moves the item to the site collection recycle bin.
Permanently Delete Deletes the item without sending it to the recycle bin.
Transfer To Another Location Transfers the item to a Send To location that has been configured at the Web application level in Central Administration.
Start A Workflow Starts the specified workflow for this stage.
Skip To Next Stage Proceeds to the next retention stage without any modifications.
Declare A Record Declares the document as a record and begins a record retention policy stage if one exists.
Delete Previous Drafts Deletes all previous drafts of the item.
Delete All Previous Versions Deletes all previous versions of the document.
The Recurrence property is not
available for all actions in the preceding list, but when it is
available, it allows the action to occur repeatedly. For instance, the
Delete All Previous Versions option can be repeated to help minimize the
number of copies of a document that are retained. Conversely, if you
chose to permanently delete a document, there will be no copies to
delete again, so you can’t configure this action as a recurring event.
The Recurrence option is only available when you have selected one of
the following three actions.
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If you have a document
that has legal requirements associated with it, you might be required to
retain the final version of the document in the Records Center for
three years and then archive it for four years, at which point you can
permanently delete the document. This three-stage information management
policy would look similar to the one shown in Figure 5 and outlined here.
Stage 1
One year after the date the document was created, it becomes a record,
and delete all previous versions of the document are deleted.
Stage 2 Three years after a document was declared a record, it is archived to another location.
Stage 3 Seven years after it was declared a record, the document is permanently deleted.
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1.1. Auditing
The auditing policy feature allows you to log events and operations performed on documents and list items. The auditing
feature will track not only operations by users but also those of
SharePoint itself and any custom code or Web services that access the
document programmatically. Figure 6 shows the types of operations that can be audited.
To view the audit log, open
the Site Settings of the repository site (or the root site in the site
collection if the repository is a subsite). Under the Site Collection
Administration section, click the Audit Log Reports link and it will
take you to a page listing each of the audit reports produced. You can
click the Run A Custom Report link to manually specify the parameters
for a report, or you can click any of the predefined reports shown in Figure 7 to generate a Microsoft Excel–based report of the audit log data.
1.2. Barcodes
Document
barcodes are another feature available in SharePoint that can help you
mark and track both the physical and electronic versions of a document. A
barcode provides a unique 10-digit identifier generated by SharePoint
2010 and rendered as an image. After the barcode is generated, you can
view it by selecting View Properties from the document context menu. You
can prompt users to insert the barcode into the document when they save
or print the document, as shown in Figure 8.
The barcode component that is shipped with SharePoint 2010 generates
barcodes compatible with the “Code 39” barcode symbology (formally known
as ANSI/AIM BC1-1995). SharePoint 2010 provides an extensible plug-in
model for barcode components that can be used to add custom barcode
generators.
Note:
BEST PRACTICES
When using labels and barcodes, place them in either the header or
footer of the document so that they appear on every page and don’t
overlay existing text.
1.3. Labeling
The labeling feature
lets SharePoint 2010 automatically generate searchable text areas that
are based on a formula that can include static text and document
metadata. This lets you insert a line of text or an external value into
the document as an image in much the same way that a label is affixed to
a document for filing. For example, an organization might want to
attach a label to a project document that includes the date it was
created. You define the formula that will generate the label by using
metadata-based identifiers such as Date Created in conjunction with
descriptive text, and SharePoint creates the label for each document
added to the document library.
To enable the label feature,
check the Enable Labels option and enter a formula by combining text
with valid column names inside curly brackets. In this example, the
formula Date Created: {Date Created} will generate the Date Created:
Date Created label, as shown in Figure 9,
and the Date Created column will be time stamped with the system date
when the document is created. Similar to barcodes, when you select the
Prompt Users To Insert A Label Before Saving Or Printing option, users
are given the option to insert the label into the document when they
save or print the document. If the label is intended to become a
permanent feature of the document, then use the Prevent Changes To The
Labels After They Are Added option to keep the label from changing in
the document. If the label is not inserted into the document, it will
still be visible from the document’s Properties window when a user
selects View Properties from the document drop-down menu in the document
library.
Note:
Labels and barcodes are
generated when the document is added to the document library. If the
policies for labels and barcodes are applied to a document library with
existing documents, they will not immediately display labels or
barcodes, but when users make changes to the documents or to a
document’s properties, the changes will trigger SharePoint to generate
labels and barcodes for the documents in that document library.
After you have
configured your information management policies, it is important for you
to review the usage of the information management policies that you
defined, which can be achieved using the reporting capabilities provided
by SharePoint 2010.
