Learn SharePoint In Series - Part Fifteen - Retention Policy Under Information Management System

Introduction

This article is the 15th part of my SharePoint series. Here are my previous articles.

In the previous article, I explained Enterprise Metadata and Keywords settings, which can be used to organize our contents and capture the properties regarding any document or any items in SharePoint lists and libraries. In this article, I am going to talk about the Retention Policy available in the Information Management Policy of SharePoint lists and libraries. This is less used but a most important feature of SharePoint. So let’s look into this in detail.

In this article, I am going to cover the following topics in detail:

Background
Introduction to Information Management Policy
Configuring Information Management Policy
Disable Information Management Policy
Summary

Background

Consider a scenario where you have too many data entries on a daily basis in single lists. Let’s assume you make daily 100 entries and you know that only the last 10 days' entries need to be maintained and the rest of the entries are not needed. So what you will do is, you filter the items by the last 10 days, and the remaining items you will delete manually. That’s not a problem. But what happens if you have too many records and you want the data older than 10 days should move to specific custom lists or document libraries or get deleted? Now if the amount of data is large then in that case it's worrisome because moving or deleting large documents or items will take too much time and manual effort. This was only one scenario. Another scenario is that if the data is in a pending state after 10 days of creation then any responsible person should be notified so that the responsible person can take any action. In order to handle the above-mentioned scenarios and many more, SharePoint provides a powerful feature known as an “Information Management Policy”. Let’s see this in detail.

Introduction

Microsoft defines Information Management Policy Settings (IMPS) as “An information management policy is a set of rules for a type of content. Information management policies enable organizations to control and track things like how long content is retained or what actions users can take with that content. Information management policies can help organizations comply with legal or governmental regulations, or they can simply enforce internal business processes.”

So we have seen that Information Management Policy is applied over contents in SharePoint. Using these settings, we can define or configure the life cycle of the contents in SharePoint. The scenario discussed in the Background section can be easily achievable by this feature. Let’s understand step by step how to use Information Management Policies in SharePoint.

Configuring Information Management Policy

Here I have created a new list with the name “Information management policy settings” to demonstrate the scenario,

Now follow the below steps to configure.

Step 1. Open the list, click on the setting icon from the top right, and then click on List Settings

Settings

Step 2. This will open up the List Setting page. Locate and click on “Information management policy settings” under the Permission and Management heading.

Policy

Step 3. This will open up the configuration page for Information management policy setting. Here you can see the types of items available on which we can apply the retention policy. In my case it's Item and Folder, but if you have added any content type to the list then that content type will be also listed in this place. Currently, this is a new list so no retention policy is applied by default so there is no retention policy option. In our case we are applying this policy to the SharePoint list items, so click on Items.

Information

Step 4. When you click on the Item, the following screen will be opened.

Edit Policy

From this screen, just check the checkbox which says “Enable Retention”. When you enable the Retention checkbox you will now see the link that says “Add a retention stage” as shown in the below figure.

Retention

Step 5. Click on the link “Add a retention stage…” and you will now see a dialog box appear in your browser window. This dialog box will allow you to select the criteria for the item. The criteria would be the action that should be taken on the item based on how many days after the item has been created.

Stage Properties

The formula will be like,

Created Date + Any Integer Number (Unit of criteria such as days, years, months)

So, if in the text box, I am writing one and I am selecting months, then in that case my action will be applied to the item after one month of the item being created. It's similar to days and years.

Step 6. The next task is to set the action. The action will include things like moving items to the recycle bin, permanently deleting, etc. The full list of actions is shown in the below figure.

Google chrome

Here if you want to send an email to any user then in that case, you can first create a workflow on the item, and then from the action you can select Start a workflow option, and that will trigger a workflow and an email will be sent. You can select any of the actions listed below. In my case, I am selecting Move to Recycle Bin because I want my item should be moved to the recycle bin once the specific time period has elapsed.

Step 7. Click on OK. Once you click on OK then you will be redirected back to the original window and the dialog window will be closed now you will see the rule that you have defined for the item.

Specify

Step 8. Click on OK. Once you will click Ok your retention policy has been activated. You will be redirected back to the Information Management Policy setting page. Now you will see that your item content type has an active retention policy associated with it.

Content types

So here we have seen how to enable and configure the Information Management Policy Settings in the lists. Now let’s look at how to disable the existing Information Management Policy that is no longer needed.

Disable Information Management Policy

In order to disable the existing Information Management Policy in the list, please follow the below steps.

Step 1. Open the Information Management Policy Setting page using Steps 1 and Step 2 from the previous example, here you will see that the item content type has a retention policy activated.

Step 2. Click on the Item link and it will display the following page.

Item link

Here you can see our previously activated retention policy is there. In order to disable this just uncheck the Enable Retention Checkbox. Once you uncheck the Enable Retention Checkbox, the retention policy will hide and you will see the defaults.

Note

If you again check the Enable Retention checkbox then the previously configured retention policy will appear again.

Checkbox

Important to note

You can define more than one retention policy over content type.
Retention Policy will not always work. Retention policy purely depends on information management policy setting service jobs available in SharePoint. If it is SharePoint on Premises then we can run the SharePoint Information Management Policy service manually, but if you are in SharePoint online, then in that case you have to wait for the next Information Management Policy service to run. Normally for SharePoint Online, users have to wait for one week. So if you have selected Created Date + 1 day then that might not work because service can be run after two days or one week. This is the major limitation of the Retention Policy in SharePoint if you are in SharePoint Online.

Summary

So in this article, I have explained the Retention Policy available in the information management policy in list settings. Although I have explained in the context of the SharePoint list, the procedure will be the same for the SharePoint document library.

If you have any questions or you want to set some complex sort of information policy then please do mention in the comment section. I will include that part also in my article.

In the next article I am going to cover RSS settings available in list settings, we will see what RSS is, how we can use RSS in SharePoint and what are the benefits and limitations of RSS in SharePoint.

1 Comment

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besiana peni7y ago
Hello Aakash and thank you for writing this article. I have enabled Retention policy on many lists on SharePoint On Premises 2013. Strangely items are deleted only from the first list that I have enabled the Retention (Workflow history). Items are not deleted even after creating a new list and applying Retention on it. Do you have any idea why that might happen? Just for information, I have tried it with content type retention, List and folders retention and also with a custom policy created on site collection level. Also, after any change I run manually Information management job and then Expiration policy job and again items are deleted only from one list.