The Scoop: SharePoint 2010 Records Management

By Mike Ferrara (@mikecferrara) Nov 3, 2009

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Last month, Alfresco announced that it had gained the distinction of being the first and only open-source software developer to achieve DoD 5015.02 records management (RM) certification.

Microsoft ~~has been~~ was in compliance for years with DoD 5015.02 Chapter 2 (not the full certification), but they are in need of showing something new and competitive in SharePoint 2010’s RM offering.

Martin Tuip, Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at Mimosa Systems, and Darrin Bishop, Darrin Bishop Group, tag-teamed a session at SPC09 on RM in SharePoint 2010 (news, site) to give us an idea of what changes have been made in the next release.

Editor's Note: We received confirmation from Microsoft that their SharePoint 2007 DoD 5015.02 Chapter 2 records management certification lapsed in May of this year.

Although SharePoint 2010 will not be certified with the DoD out of the box, they are working on certification plans.

What is Records Management

The session began with a brief description of what records management is and what constitutes a record. Wikipedia defines records management as “the practice of maintaining the records of an organization from the time they are created up to their eventual disposal.

This may include classifying, storing, securing, and destruction (or in some cases, archival preservation) or records.” The time that an organization considers information to be relevant or valuable is on a per case basis.

Although not always the case, a primary driving factor in records management is compliance with legal standards. A document or email becomes an item of record when it contains information about the running of the business, contains information that must be retained with statutory requirements or contains information about an employee or a potential employee.

Because judicial bodies can classify records as potential evidence in lawsuits, it is very important to include RM with your SharePoint deployments.

How SharePoint 2010 Improves on ERM

In Place Records Management

One of the new industry trends is the idea of in-place records management rather than a central repository of documents that requires a routing service. In this method, the documents stay in the current location, and they are classified as business records.

This will allow the document to gain the appropriate security, retention and disposition without ever having to be routed to a centrally managed location.

This saves IT resources and will more than likely decrease time spent during eDiscovery. New in SharePoint 2010 is the adoption of this technique, which will surely be a good choice for many organizations looking into RM.

Updates to Records Center

The live demo showed off the new slick, AJAX-friendly UI on top of the new Records Center site. For some organizations, the dedicated records center repository is more ideal, so Microsoft has given the site a major face-lift.

Not only is it a lot easier to submit a record (as seen below by the large “Submit a Record” button), but the overall layout of the site is cleaner. You can also search for document IDs right on the main page.

During the demo Darrin Bishop showed us how he created new content types with information rights management (IRM) configured. He was able to very quickly set up retention stages for multiple scenarios relating to documents.

One stage created was one that would delete all previous drafts of a document 3 years after the document was created. Another was a stage that would move the document to the recycle bin after a lifecycle of 7 years.

Auditing, barcodes and labels have been retained from the features seen in SharePoint 2007.

SharePoint 2010 - Records Management

The big push in this release is for greater adoption from end users themselves. The Records Center site has been redesigned so that it is easier for a records manager to maintain the order of the site. The RM configuration page displays step-by-step instructions to guide the user in how to properly setup the hierarchy.