James Lappin is a highly respected electronic records management guru out of the UK. James twitters often about RM issues and occasionally references this blog. I 
get a lot of readers coming here through links James creates in his RM tweets. Unfortunately, I’ve never corresponded with James because I don’t twitter. (It’s hard enough keeping track of all the other records I’m producing without adding tweets into the mix.)
Anyway, James recently posted a tweet referencing my post of my Office 14 SharePoint RM wish list. James suggested that he would add the ability to manage entire team sites as records to the list. I thought that was a very interesting idea. Something I hadn’t thought of before. What do you folks think? Do you see a need for this? How would you expect to manage whole team sites as records?
I know that some of the guys on the SharePoint product team occasionally check out this blog, so it may put a bug in their heads if they see there is a demand for this kind of feature out there in the real world. Let me know your thoughts…
March 31, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Hi Don, thank you for the kind words: I got a nice suprise when I saw this post.
What do you think of the SharePoint records centre?
At the moment the records centre is the only place in SharePoint where you can apply retention rules to documents. You have to use it if you want to treat documents as records within SharePoint. But the records centre adds very little value and requires a big overhead to administer.
If SharePoint gave us the ability to store our retention rules, and then link them to objects within the SharePoint environment (whether that be a team site, or a document library, or a folder, or even a content type) then we wouldn’t need the records centre.
Mind you that would not be a trivial change to make to the software!
Another challenge with the records centre is that it is only geared up to take documents. But SharePoint provides a whole host of collaborative tools that people can use to record and communicate about their work, most of which can’t be rolled up and sent to the records centre. The worst example of this is the document workspace where the discussions around the document can’t be sent to the records centre. Being able to treat a whole team site as a record would get over this problem.
It would be great to chat about this stuff with you: are you on skype? (I am jameshlappin on skype)
April 12, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Hi James,
It sounds to me like you’re not quite as enthusiastic about SharePoint records management as I am. I understand where you are coming from. The Records Center clearly has some shortcomings. But, to be fair, there is also a lot of misinformation out there about how SharePoint can be used to manage records. That’s why I started this blog.
Addressing your concerns, you can apply retention policies to ANY Library in SharePoint, not just those in the Records Center. The retention policy (‘Expiration Policy’ in SharePoint-speak) is applied as an Information Management Policy setting. The nice thing about that is it will allow Records Managers to apply disposition to non-record material. That way, RM’s can declare records into the Records Center and manage them through their proper retention periods AND dispose of non-records residing in Document Libraries.
As for storing document discussions, isn’t it possible to export those discussions to a text or Word file and then declare them as records as part of a business process?