In my first post of this series, I showed you how to configure Content Organizer to run on your site.  In this post, I will walk you through each of the Content Organizer settings options and explain what each option does. 

To get to the Content Organizer settings, click on ‘Site Actions’ and select ‘Site Settings’.  Under ‘Site Administration’, click on ‘Content Organizer Settings’.  (If you don’t see this option, refer back to the initial post in this series.)

The first setting forces users to utilize the Content Organizer when they submit to the Records Center documents that have one or more corresponding Content Organizer Rules.  [Note - SharePoint 2010 allows you to use the Content Organizer to route documents to any Library or folder in your server farm and is not just limited to Records Center site Libraries.  However, because this blog is focused on SharePoint Records Management, we will focus our attention on managing records in the Records Center.] 

The second setting allows you to determine if you want to restrict the Content Organizer to Libraries and folders within the original site or open it to other sites across other site collections.  (This setting will determine how you configure the Target Location in your Content Organizer Rules.)

The third setting, Folder Partitioning, allows you to create additional folders once specific number of records are created in a target folder.  [Note - This feature may be particularly helpful to EU Records Managers subject to MoReq2 requirements.]  If this setting is not enabled, SharePoint will ignore the number of records submitted to each folder.

The fourth setting, Duplicate Submissions, controls how SharePoint responds when a record with the same name already exists in the target Library or folder.  The options are to create a SharePoint version of the record or append unique characters to the duplicate record name.  Records Managers should determine which of these options is most appropriate for their organization’s requirements. 

The fifth setting determines if audit logs and properties of the document are included with the document when it is declared a record into the Records Center.  This is likely to be important metadata relevant to the record and should probably be preserved.

The last setting allows you to specify your designated Rule Managers.  These are any users who should be granted authority to create Content Organizer Rules. 

The next installment of this series will describe how to leverage these settings to create Content Organizer Rules.