SharePoint 2010 Hold and eDiscovery Feature – Part 1

Friends, I was working on document and records management functionality for SharePoint 2010 and found good feature named eDiscovery. e(Electronic)Discovery is an area we are supporting with new set of capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010.

What is eDiscovery :

It is the process of finding, preserving, analyzing and producing content in electronic formats as required by litigation or investigations.

eDiscovery is an important concern for all of our customers and given that SharePoint has grown to be an integral part of collaboration, document, and records management for many organizations, we recognize the need to support the eDiscovery process for SharePoint content.

This feature was available in MOSS 2007 as well but it was scoped to the Records Center site template.

With SharePoint Server 2010 the eDiscovery capabilities have been greatly expanded to provide more functionality and the power to use these features across your entire SharePoint deployment.

eDiscovery Process :

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model provides an overview of the different parts of the eDiscovery process

All in all Microsoft has made some fairly substantial improvements to SharePoint 2010 holds and electronic discovery functionality over the features that were first available in MOSS 2007.  Perhaps the biggest change is making SharePoint 2010 holds available beyond the confines of the Records Center.  Unlike the feature in MOSS 2007, holds in SharePoint 2010 can be managed across libraries, sites and site collections.

The eDiscovery Feature: How we can achieve this functionality. I will explain how to activate this feature and use.

Activating the Hold and eDiscovery Feature:

SharePoint 2010 Hold and eDiscovery is a site level feature that can be activated on any site.  To activate this feature, log into SharePoint as a user with administrator privileges and click on ‘Site Actions’.  Select ‘Site Settings’ from the Site Action list and click on ‘Manage site features’ under the ‘Site Actions’ category.  Next to the Hold and eDiscovery feature, click the ‘Activate’ button.

Activating this feature creates a new category in Site Settings that provides links to Holds and Hold Reports lists. There is also a page to discover and hold content that allows you to search for content and add it to a hold. Once the Hold and eDiscovery feature is activated you can create holds and add to hold any content in the site collection. By default only Site Collection administrators have access to the Hold and eDiscovery pages. To give other users permission, add them to the permissions list for the Hold Reports and Holds lists. This will also give access to the Discover and hold content page.

The next post in this series will describe how holds are created and applied to SharePoint content.