SharePoint 2010 – Record Center

The Records Center was introduced in 2007 as a SharePoint site that served as a conventional records archive. Content from all over the enterprise can be submitted to a Records Center and then routed to the appropriate place where it picks up the right permissions and policies, such as expiration and auditing. For SharePoint 2010, we know it’s important to continue to invest here and add even more “traditional” archive features. When looking at the broad swath of features we had to choose from, our goals here really focused on providing features that allow you to extract the most value out of an archive and find the data you need.

Overview:

The Records Center is intended to serve as a central repository in which an organization can store and manage all of its records such as legal or financial documents. The Records Center supports the entire records management process, from records collection through records management to records disposition.

Here are a few of the new features in a SharePoint 2010 Records Center:

Document ID: Every document can be assigned a unique identifier, which stays with the document even when it’s archived. This allows records to be easily referenced by an ID no matter where the document moves.

Multi-Stage Retention: Retention policies can have multiple stages, allowing you to specify the entire document lifecycle as one policy (e.g. review Contracts every year, and delete after 7 years)

Per-Item Audit Reports: You can generate a customized audit report about an individual record.

Hierarchal File Plans: You can create deep, hierarchal folder structures and manage retention at each folder in the hierarchy (or inherit from parent folders).

File Plan Report: You can generate status reports showing the number of items in each stage of the file plan, along with a rollup of the retention policies on each node in the plan.

In next post i will explain how to use Record Center as Central Repository for all documents.