Record
Declaration is one of the many new things introduced within SharePoint 2010.
When implementing document management, we always come across scenarios where
the final document is ready and we should lock it down so that no one can
tamper with it and the document remains safe within the organization until it
reaches its retention period. Such documents can be Staff files within an organization,
any property related papers, insurance papers or so on. So, once we decide that
the final version of any item within our SharePoint site is ready and we want
to keep it for certain period of time without giving anyone the ability to
change its content, we would prefer to lock it down and make it a RECORD.
Record
declaration can be done manually or can be done as part of the Information
Management policy within the document library. We will see how to create any
item as record in this blog post.
- Manual declaration of Records
As
we click on the Record declaration settings, we see three radio buttons:
Use
the site collection default settings: Do not allow manual declaration of
records
This
will not allow users to declare the items as records manually from the ribbon
button within the document library.
Always
allow the manual declaration of records
This
will introduce a ribbon button within the Document section (highlighted in the
figure), clicking on this button will make the item as record and no more
updates will be allowed on it any further.
Never
allow the manual declaration of records
As
name signifies, we cannot make the items as records by selecting this.
Also,
we see the check box for automatically declare items as records as they are
added to the list, checking this check box will make the items are records with
no functionality to update the item in the future. This is very useful as we
deal with documents which have just one version i.e., the final version.
Now
we saw that either we can manually declare items as records which is very
simple or we do it programmatically. But we can also declare records as part of
the Information management policy within the document library.
- Schedule the record declaration
We
can schedule the record declaration by enabling the retention on the items. See
Retention in SharePoint 2010 post for more details on how to implement
retention to SharePoint items.
There
may be a case where we would want to automatically declare items as records
after a certain period (say Created Date + 2 years). This can be automated by
the following way:
- Click on Information management policy setting under Permissions and management in library settings.
- Click on the content type of the document, you want to declare records.
- Check the Enable Retention checkbox
- Click on Add a retention Stage
- Select Time period as Created + 2 years
- Select Declare record in the Action drop down
- Click Ok and save your retention schedule for the particular content type.
