According to a 2011 AIIM survey, organizations are experiencinga 23% yearly growth in electronic records. This rapid growthpresents a challenge to organizations that must comply with recordsmanagement regulations while ensuring that the right people areaccessing the right information.

To address this challenge, many organizations are looking toMicrosoft SharePoint. With its powerful record-keepingcapabilities, organizations can now manage their records using thesame platform as they use for everyday collaboration and documentmanagement.

Records management is one of the most popular drivers for usingMicrosoft SharePoint. Despite how much has been written onthis, records management is sometimes confused with document orcontent management, but it is in fact quite a unique disciplinewith its own best practices and processes. Microsoft SharePointprovides some great features to enable these processes, and itprovides enterprises with the appropriate controls for the data anddocuments that they declare to be corporate records.

A record refers to a document or some other piece of data in anenterprise (electronic or physical) that provides evidence ofa transaction or activity taking place, or some corporate decisionthat was made. A record requires that it be retained by theorganization for some period of time. This is often a legal orregulatory compliance requirement. As well, a record bydefinition must be immutable, which means that once a document orpiece of data is declared to be a record, it must remainunchanged.

The period for which records are retained, along with theprocess followed once that time period has expired, is a criticalrequirement for records management. There are legal andbusiness implications to consider when content is kept toolong. The business policy could be that after X years, arecord is archived and then after Y years from that point it isdisposed (which could include deletion or moving it to offlinelong-term storage). Again, establishing this policy requiresplanning and getting agreement from stakeholders, especially aroundany legal, regulatory compliance, revenue or tax implications.

The requirements for records immediately suggest certainprocesses that must be in place to ensure that recordsare managed appropriately from several perspectives: business, auditing/legal, tax, revenue, and even businesscontinuity. As we often find, for business processes to beapplied consistently across all SharePoint content or records,automation is a key requirement, as well as making appropriate useof metadata.

The first step in implementing records management in SharePointis to define a file plan, which typically includes:

• A description of the types of documents that the organizationconsiders to be records
• A taxonomy for categorizing the records
• Retention policies that define how long a record will be keptand how to handle disposition
• Information about who owns the record throughout itsinformation lifecycle, and who should have access to therecord

It is important to determine what type of content should beconsidered a record. For example, if I am working on a new HRpolicy for next year, my initial draft and its variousiterations should likely not be considered records because they arestill changing – they are not yet approved or final, nor can I makeany decisions based on those preliminary versions.

But once my HR plan is approved or otherwise consideredfinal then it can be declared a record because I can now basecorporate decisions on it. Establishing a policy around whattype of data is a record requires planning, meeting withappropriate stakeholders and agreeing on policy that's communicatedto everyone that may be declaring content as a record.

Once the organization has defined what information it wants topreserve as records, SharePoint 2010 provides several methods todeclare a record and implement record retention policies. These include the Records Center site, which is a SharePointsite dedicated to centrally storing and managing records. Itprovides many features that are critical to implementing a recordsmanagement system, including a dashboard view at the site level forrecords managers with searching capabilities and integration withthe Content Organizer for routing records within the site.

Depending on the business need, it may make sense to centralizerecords management and storage in the Records Center. This isparticularly true if the business demands that a small number ofusers be considered “record managers” and it is their role alone todeclare content as records.

A second method involves declaring records “in-place.” Thisfeature allows individual users to declare content as records intheir current SharePoint location. Records do not need to be movedor added to a central Records Center site, nor do they need to berouted within the Records Center. This is a trend in the recordsmanagement space, because it allows users to continue to findcontent where it resides, based on its business nature, topic orproperties. One drawback of this approach is that end users – whoare typically not records managers – may be apprehensive aboutdeclaring records, due to the official and legal nature of arecord.

The powerful recordkeeping capabilities in SharePoint giveorganizations an effective enterprise records management system.SharePoint contains valuable features that can be used to definethe appropriate records and retention policies for thebusiness.

Antonio Maio isMicrosoft SharePoint Server MVP and senior product manager atTITUS in Ottawa, Ontario.