When considering records management we must also consider at what point, under what circumstances, or what trigger occurs that we should declare information as a record. Often this trigger will be some kind of agreement or approval, perhaps from senior management or from a customer. There are typically four ways to declare a record from an existing document or existing information:

Manually declaring records

If a SharePoint administrator has configured a connection to a records center or you are using in-place records management, users will be able to use the SharePoint interface to declare a document as a record. Manually declaring records can be useful, since it does not require much special onfiguration; however, when considering the importance of records management to your organization, you must consider if it is appropriate to rely on users understanding the correct time to declare records and to remember to do the action. Also, manual declaration does not always scale well in large environments.

Using retention policies

You can use retention policies to declare items as records at a predefined interval. The interval will be calculated from any date field that applies to the item, including custom column date fields. Once the interval is reached, the policy can declare the item a record (in-place) or transfer the item to a location such as a records center. SharePoint supports multi-stage retention policies; for example, you can have a policy that declares an in-place record six months after creation, subsequently transfers the item to a records center after another year and then deletes the item 5 years after the last modification date.

Using a workflow to declare records

You can create workflows in SharePoint Designer that use the send item to repository action. This action can send items to a records center. Adding this kind of records declaration into a workflow is very powerful because users can use the workflow to assist other processes without realizing that records management is being done in the background. For example, you could create a workflow for document approval that notifies a senior manager when the document is ready for approval and enables the manager to approve the document and then when the document is approved, sends a copy of the document to the records center.

Using custom solutions for records declaration

You can also create custom solutions using Visual Studio that leverage the records management functions, such as records declaration or sending items to a records center. These solutions can use additional triggers that are not available to no-code workflows, such as dedicated timer jobs.

Disposing of Records In addition to how your organization will create or declare records, you must consider how your organization will dispose of records. Typically you will need to keep records for a predetermined period of time, such as five years; therefore, retention policies in the records center can help to keep records storage manageable and automatically cleared out. Additionally, retention policies enable you to start a workflow, such as a disposition workflow, to check with content managers or compliance officers whether records can be deleted as they expire.