The Integrated Information Lifecycle Management model calls for retention and disposition across all of your organization’s content. In SharePoint this means you are almost certain to apply Information Management Polices to some (and possibly all) of your content based on location rather than Content Type.
You’ll need to apply these Information Management Policies to your Document and Record Libraries both inside and outside of the Records Center. So here’s a quick look at how you set that up on a Document Library in SharePoint 2010.
First, navigate to the target Library (in this case ‘Maintenance’) and click on the ‘Library’ tab:
From the ribbon, click on ‘Settings’ and select ‘Library Settings’:
Under ‘Permissions and Management’ select ‘Information management policy settings’:
Libraries in SharePoint 2010 default to the Information Management Policy set on its Content Type. For location based retention and disposition, you will have to override this. Click on ‘Change source’:
Select ‘Library and Folders’ and click on OK:
(Note: At this point, you may get a message warning that you are overwriting Content Type policies defined by the Site Administrator. If you get this warning, just ignore it because you always thought the Site Administrator was kind of a jerk who never knew what he was doing, anyway.)
Under ‘Non-Records’, click on ‘Add a retention stage…’:
Next, select a date from any existing date field in the Content Type to start your retention period. Then enter the number of days, months or years that the retention period lasts:
Move down and select either an action to take at the end of the retention period or choose to start any workflow the has already been assigned to the Library:
Click ‘OK’ and the Information Management Policy has been assigned to the Library. (Note: folders in this library will inherit this policy by default unless you specifically break inheritance on the folder.):
To verify that this policy has been assigned to the content in your Library, navigate to any document in the Library and view its Compliance Details. This dialog will display the retention policy it is inheriting from the Library:
Obviously, I’m just scratching the surface with Information Management Policies here. There are a bunch more additional features that I haven’t yet discussed, but I hope to get to them soon. In the meantime, I hope this is enough to get you started poking around…
The third phase of the Information Lifecycle, Use, takes place after the information has been created and distributed and focuses on leveraging the information to generate business decisions, document further actions and serve a number of other purposes.
