Recently I spoke at the San Antonio SharePoint User Group on the ECM, and one of the questions I was asked was whether blogs could be declared records. The answer is ‘yes’, and I think the reason illustrates how the RM capabilities within SharePoint are maturing. They are no longer relegated to a specific site off in the corner of the farm, they are embedded within and available across the SharePoint platform.
With SharePoint 2007, if you stuck to out-of-the-box functionality you were forced to manage records in a very elementary manner. The platform was extensible enough though, to allow just about anything you needed through customizations. An example of the extensibility is the DoD 5015 add-on which provided the necessary functionality for SharePoint to receive certification in 2007.
A lot of new RM functionality has been included in SharePoint 2010, such as re-implementation of many features of the add-on and new features like in-place declaration. One of the nice things is how the functionality has been implemented: RM capabilities are no longer isolated to a specific Records Center site but can be applied to documents and list items across the farm.
A good example if this is the ability to declare blog posts. To be clear here, SharePoint does not treat blog posts as documents but rather they are list items. There are many options for how records, either documents or list items, can be declared such as manually by a user, via a workflow process, or automatically when the post is published. These can be done largely without code, but with a little customization many more options are available.
In this example we’ll look at manually declaring the blog post. For our scenario, a blog site has been set up for the CEO in which he shares his hot opinions. He has created a post and now we need to declare it.
To declare the record, we go to the list containing the blog items by clicking on ‘Manage Posts’. From within the list, we select the blog post by clicking the checkbox and then clicking the ‘Declare Record’ button in the ribbon.
Finally, we can look at the Compliance Details and see that our corporate retention policies. In this case, the blog post is annual review after 2 years and then deleted after 5. Additionally, we can apply a hold on this blog post which will suspend the retention policies.
Hopefully you’ve seen how easy it is to declare a blog post as a record. Also, because the RM capabilities are now part of the underlying SharePoint platform we have the ability to apply RM rules and policies to content outside of the Records Center.
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