I’ve been in Information Technology for over 22 years and in Enterprise Content and Records Management (ECRM) on both the product and services sides for more than 16 years. I’ve worked with virtually all of the largest ECRM products and I’ve been directly or indirectly responsible for getting many of them DoD 5015.2 certified. I’ve worked almost exclusively with SharePoint-based records and information management since collaborating with the Microsoft ECRM Development Team prior to the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 07 (MOSS 07).
I am a Certified Records Manager (CRM) and a Certified Document and Imaging Architect (CDIA). Until recently, I was Director of Compliance Products for one of the world’s leading ECRM products and services companies. I am currently the Founder and President of HarborPoint Information Management, LLC, a consulting firm committed to bringing integrated information lifecycle management services to MOSS 07, SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 customer deployments.
Thanks for stopping by. Please come back again soon and add your comments to our discussion.
Cheers,
Don Lueders, CRM, CDIA
October 9, 2008 at 9:08 am
Yeah, you finally jumped into the Blog pool! Nice job. I will be a regular reader.
March 20, 2010 at 8:17 pm
I also wanted to say hello to both Russ and Don from an old friend. I found your post as I was researching Sharepoint info for a client and was impressed. Very nice work and I hope both of you are doing well.
Thanks,
Dan Bailey
March 21, 2010 at 12:11 am
Dan!
Good to hear from you, buddy. Things are going great at this end. I’m sure Russ would say the same thing.
Let me know if your customer has any SharePoint issues we should discuss. We’re always interested in hearing from people in the trenches.
Cheers,
Don
October 9, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Russ, thanks for stopping by. Let me know if you have any suggestions. I can always advice from an old Blogshpere veteran.
July 22, 2009 at 9:30 pm
I am experiencing an issue with records management in SharePoint and seeing your blog was hoping you may be able to assist. I have configured records management and the routing table correctly. However, when an entry is routed to the records center, it recognizes it just fine (I can tell since it routes it to the appropriate library) but once it gets routed, instead of retaining its content type, it gets assigned the “default content type” on the document library. All content types were deployed using a solution package to ensure the GUIDs would match in the active site collection and the records center so I am sure that is not what is causing this. Have you run into this and can you offer any assistance in resolving it? I’d appreciate any help you can provide.
July 24, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Deepa,
Do you have your Records Libraries configured to accept multiple content types? If so, the Records Center is designed to default incoming records with multiple content types to one common content type. (Though you can always find the record’s original content type in the associated metadata sidecar XML document.)
If you don’t want to get into a lot of custom development, you might consider creating an Enterprise Record Content Type, as I suggest in this post: http://sharepointrm.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/the-record-content-type/.
September 24, 2009 at 3:42 am
Hi Don,
what a great blog, I read it regularly and am always impressed. I wanted to let you know about our product RecordPoint which is built on top of SharePoint to enable compliance with ISO 15489. If you interested give me a yell and I’d be glad to take you thru it.
Cheers
September 29, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Anthony,
Thanks for the kind words. Your product sounds interesting. Can you provide me a link to more information on it?
Regards,
Don
December 30, 2009 at 3:00 pm
My name is Silvia, I am writing you from Argentina. I work as a functional analyst in a big company, and we are using Sharepoint 2003 and planning to migrate to MOSS. In this scenario, we would like to use Record Center in order to apply some document retention policies.
We find very very usefull to send a document from any DL to the RC and leave a link in the DL (not a copy of the file but a link to the file into the RC). Can you please tell me if you had implemented this anywhere? If you know about any other persona that has implemented this? If you found some troubles?
I would like to heard your experience
Thanks for your time, and sorry about my English
Regards from Argentina
December 31, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Silvia,
Thank you for stopping by. And please don’t apologize about your English. It is much better than my Spanish! :0)
Your plan to create links to records in the Records Center is a very good one. And a design I recommend to my customers often – regardless of their choice of records management solution. Maintaining a link to a record, rather than simply making a copy of a record in the Records Center, provides a number of real benefits. I won’t bore you with long descriptions of all of them (besides, that’s what I get paid for!), but here are a couple of quick examples:
• Having a link to a record in the original Document Library allows your users to access all their work artifacts in one location, while still limiting your organization to one copy of your ‘official’ records.
• A link to records makes retention and disposition of your organization’s non-record material much more efficient. This is because you can apply an expiration period to all of the transitory material in the Document Library (either event-based, e.g. ‘Destroy Everything at End of Project’, or time-based, e.g. ‘Destroy 6 months after the Document was Last Modified’) without affecting the records located in the Records Center.
To be honest, I haven’t personally had a customer who configured MOSS 07 to create a link to records in the Records Center, but I am very familiar with organizations who have and they are always very happy with the result. Unfortunately, MOSS 07 doesn’t allow you to create a record link out-of- the-box, but the good news is, SharePoint 2010 will. If you haven’t upgraded to MOSS 07 yet, you may want to think about waiting a few months until SharePoint 2010 comes out and upgrade right to that.
Hope this helps. Keep us up on your progress.
Don
February 9, 2010 at 6:13 am
Hi Don,
I just found your blog a few days ago and already I’m learning a lot. Thank you!
I wonder if I could ask you a question about SP2010 in-place records. A frequent request of me, already, with respect to the new 2010 declare record in-place functionality is whether or not the process of declaring a record in-place can be interrupted to prompt the user for additional information. For example, some metadata isn’t required unless/until a piece of content becomes a record. There doesn’t appear to be any way to collect this metadata (columns in the list/library) before allowing the item/document to be declared a record. Since these fields aren’t required for non-records, I can’t simply make them required across the board. In looking through what documentation I’ve been able to find so far, I can’t find anything that suggests this is possible. Do you know if it is?
Thank you in advance!
Andrew
February 9, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Andrew,
I moved your comment to my Q&A on SharePoint 2010 with Adam Harmetz. You can find it here.
Don
June 21, 2010 at 10:41 am
I wonder if I could ask you a question about SP2010 in-place records. A frequent request of me, already, with respect to the new 2010 declare record in-place functionality is whether or not the process of declaring a record in-place can be interrupted to prompt the user for additional information. For example, some metadata isn’t required unless/until a piece of content becomes a record. There doesn’t appear to be any way to collect this metadata (columns in the list/library) before allowing the item/document to be declared a record. Since these fields aren’t required for non-records, I can’t simply make them required across the board. In looking through what documentation I’ve been able to find so far, I can’t find anything that suggests this is possible. Do you know if it is?
+1
June 24, 2010 at 11:17 am
Aksel,
This is a fantastic question and one I should know the answer to. But I don’t. (Though my gut tells me this is a problem that will require some customization.)
Let me play around with SP2010 and consult some of my propellor-head friends and get back to you soon.
Thanks!
Don
June 28, 2010 at 4:08 pm
Aksel,
I spoke with a friend of mine, Peter Duszkiewicz, about your question. Peter is a SharePoint guru out of New York who has probably forgotten more about SharePoint 2010 development than I’ll ever know. Peter confirmed my suspicion that you are going to need to do customization. Here’s some of what Peter said:
“The answer is unfortunately no, not without customization. It’s most likely because of the way in-place record management is implemented. When you enable in-place record management you’re allowed to set how records are declared and create policies within libraries that have retention. When you declare a record in place what happens under the covers is the item is checked out by the system account thus preventing it from being modified.”
Thanks for the great question. Please come back and let us know how things work out for you.
Don
April 22, 2011 at 7:32 pm
Hello Don:
The SCIE ARMA Chapter would really enjoy you as a speaker sometime next year. Can you please contact me at the e-mail provided to discuss?
Thanks in advance,
Brandon L. Reeder
SCIE ARMA, Chapter President
http://www.sciearma.org
May 23, 2011 at 2:47 am
Hi,
I have set retention policies to my document library
Following are the steps i did
1) went to information management policy settings
2) Enabled Retention on document content type
Added a retention stage
Event: declared record + 0 days
Action: Transfer to another location
Type of transfer: Move and leave a link
Destination Location: [record center connection name]
when i declare a document as record i want the document to get transferred to record center right away
But its not happening for me .Is there any thing i am missing ? do i have to check any job definitions?
Thanks in advance
May 23, 2011 at 11:47 pm
Hi Spoorthi,
It sounds like you may have a couple of configuration issues here. Where is the IMP set? On the Content Type, the Document Library or the Record Center Libraries?
And how are you declaring records? Manually or through an automated process?
Based on the limited information you provide above, I’d say you probably want to configure your records declaration to be done manually, but save a link in your collaboration spaces. You probably want to set retention on your Record Center libraries and folders and configure them to declare records for anything that is added to the file plan. I would suggest applying an IMP to your Document Libraries, too, as a general best practice.
Hope this helps,
Don
August 7, 2011 at 7:31 pm
good job; i’m a developer/information manager, building a demonstration SharePoint records center site in CloudShare. thinking about what type of web parts i can build out with visual studio; any suggestions.
August 28, 2011 at 2:48 pm
Hi
I am form Argentina. I am working at an enterprise that uses Sharepoint 2007 as its record mgmt systema. We are planning to migrate to SPS 2010
We have developed a custom circuit in MOSS 2007 that allow people sending document from a document library to the record center, moving it and leaving a link (the same that now is OOB with SPS2010). The file persists in the Record Center site collection, and we also assign an unique document id to each document. Everything done with an event handler in the document library.
The thing is that we are planning to migrate to SPS2010 forusing all this OOB features. But I need to know waht happends with de Document Id when you decide to send the document to the Record Center (configuring the opcion “Move and Leave a Link”). In fact what I need to know is how all this feature works. Can you help me providing me all this information or senfing me some links where I can obtain it?
Thank you so much for your answer and please sorry about my limited english
Regards
Silvia
August 28, 2011 at 9:26 pm
Silvia,
Wow! It sounds like you guys have developed a terrific records management solution in MOSS 07. I’d love to see it one day. I’m sure your transition to SharePoint 2010 will be a very smooth one given how well you’ve managed your records repository in MOSS 07.
I assume you were using the Record Routing Tables feature in MOSS 07 to move your documents into the Records Center. You will find that the Content Organizer in SharePoint 2010 is a much more robust feature that makes your records declaration strategy far more efficient and user friendly.
As for the Document ID, there isn’t a lot material out there yet. I think this is because users are still trying to fully understand how powerful a feature it can be. To answer your specific question though, the Doc ID is a persistent attribute value. It stays with the document no matter where it goes. And this includes moving it to the Records Center.
Please come back here often, Silvia. We’d love to hear about how your transition to SharePoint 2010 is going and some of the challenges you face setting up your new records repository. (Oh, and don’t worry about your English. It’s infinitely better than my Spanish!)
Cheers,
Don
October 19, 2011 at 11:47 pm
Don,
Great meeting you at ARMA! Have you seen the ability to capture a SP10 site as a records in the records center? If so, could you please share the steps to do so? Thanks!
Linda Bigsby
October 21, 2011 at 2:45 am
Hi Linda,
It was nice meeting you at ARMA, too. Please come back and comment here often.
I have had other people ask me about declaring an entire site as a record and I don’t have a SharePoint out-of-the-box answer for them. I would be interested in understanding the use case for a feature like that because it tends to go against standard records management practices. As an example, there are likely to be multiple records (perhaps hundreds or thousands, in some cases) maintained in the same Records Center all with different retention, disposition and security requirements. Why would you want to retain all of these records for the same amount of time by declaring the entire site as a record? My sense is that would cause more problems than it would solve.
That being said, if this is a really a requirement for your organization, there is likely to be a solution for it. Is the Record Center in a virtual image? If so, just do a snapshot of the image and declare that entire snapshot a record. If the Records Center is not in a virtual image, you can probably get everything you would need to reproduce the site by doing a full system backup of the SQL database and declaring that file as a record.
Let me know if this doesn’t help and we can discuss it further…
Cheers,
Don
November 14, 2011 at 3:10 am
Hi Don,
I am a newly appointed Records Manager in a not-for-profit organisation that is committed to Microsoft. We are planning to implement a recordkeeping system over the next 3 years, and I am following the DIRKS process.
I am about to have a conversation the the IT department about Sharepoint and its Records Management capabilities, and I was wondering if you could point me in the direction of posts you have made about some of the strengths and weaknesses of relying solely on Sharepoint for records management.
Thanks.
Regards,
Michael
Melbourne, Australia
November 17, 2011 at 3:39 pm
Hello, Mike -
Thanks for stopping by. I’ve been to Melbourne a number of times and I just love your city. It’s always good to hear from our friends in Oz.
It sounds like you are starting a very exciting project. Please keep us all up on your progress. Our readers would appreciate hearing about the challenges you face and what you do to resolve them.
Can I assume you are using SharePoint 2010? If so, my company is drafting a document that I think will answer your questions. It won’t be public for a week or two, but I’ll get it out to you as soon as it’s released. (Since it is coming from my company rather than this blog, I will send it to you offline.)
Cheers,
Don
January 23, 2012 at 9:06 pm
Don’t have a question yet. I just came across your blog while doing some online research. I am a newly hired Records Manager at a city agency in NY. Although, I have experience with metadata reporting, compliance, and about 15 years in different corporate capacities, records management as a sole responsibility is somewhat new to me. Your blog has already been a source of extremely useful information, and for that I thank you.
January 24, 2012 at 12:55 pm
Thanks, Hamilton! I’m delighted to hear from you. Please return soon and let us know how the new job is coming along. We’re all in this together and we’d love to hear about the challenges you face as well as any of your victories…
Cheers!
Don
May 29, 2012 at 11:41 am
Hello Don,
I read your blog quite often and everytime I google sharepoint AND RM your blog is in the high raking. In my implementation of encountered a (imho) strange phenomenon: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010general/thread/fed7dec7-9e32-4ea2-bf3c-b36db4b74b8b
Does this (probably easy to fix) set-up come familiar to you?
My apologies for putting this post so bluntly in your “about me” page.
Best regards,
Vincent
May 30, 2012 at 9:43 pm
Hi Vincent,
You pose a great question that has more of a records management best practices solution than a SharePoint solution.
I’d like to share this discussion with all of my readers so I’m going to post an article about it very soon. Look for something on my home page over the next couple of days.
Thanks taking the time to comment!
Cheers,
Don
April 12, 2013 at 6:08 am
[...] Lueders, D. (n.d.). SharePointRecordsManagement.com. Retrieved from http://sharepointrecordsmanagement.com/about/ [...]