SharePoint2010 : Introduction to Record Center

The Records Center is intended to serve as a central repository in which an organization can store and manage all of its records. The Records Center supports the entire records management process, from records collection through records management to records disposition.

When we are implementing Document Management within our organization, and we have thousands of documents to maintain within a library whereas many of them are historic, and we do not use them very often, it makes sense to keep them separate and not clog your library with huge number of items. Hence, SharePoint gives us the flexibility for document retention using Record center. We can create record center and send our documents to it once they are approved and are in their final version. Sending to Record center can be of three types mainly: 

• Copy the document to Record Center 
• Move the document to Record Center
• Move to the document to Record Center and Leave a link

As per the business case, we can implement any of the above mentioned way to treat our items within the library. 

Steps to implement Document Management through Record center: 

• Create Record Center
• Create Send To Connection for your web application
• Setting Content Organizer Rules within Record Center
• Finally, sending the actual document

SharePoint2010 : Create Record Center

Creating Record Center is very simple. It is just created like any other team site within SharePoint. 

• Go to All site Content. Click Create 
• Select Site > Record Center

• Enter the desired display name and the URL for the record center
• Click on Create

There you go!! The Record center is created and ready to use.

You might notice the Drop Off Library is listed on the left hand navigation which is a part of Content Organizer is activated by default. 

This is the temporary placeholder library where all the items when sent to the Record center using Send To connection are stored. We will have to set rules to this library to move our items to their destination library within the Record Center.

SharePoint 2010: Documents not routing in Drop Off Library

Drop Off Library, one of the very useful feature of SharePoint 2010 is very helpful when you have thousands of documents and you have to sort them out or redirect them to their owners or route them to their respective libraries. As you know that we need to activate the Content Organizer at out site level to use drop off libraries. Sometimes, the documents you send to the drop off libraries and not routed instantly in-spite of the fact that the rule you mentioned in the Content Organizer Rules is matching the documents. If this is your scenario, please try the following to get your routing started.

• Make sure all the required fields for the content type you are routing has valid values in them
• If you want to manually run the Content Organizer Processing job(in Central Admin), it will start the routing process and will route the documents instantly. This job is scheduled to run daily by default. Whenever this job runs and it cannot route the documents in the drop off library, it will send an email to the Rule manager stating the reason and some instructions.