Content Management Chicago | Concurrency, Inc.

One of my favorite AIIM events each year is the annual Executive Forum. For those unfamiliar with the event, it’s the premier event for executives from companies in the document and content management channel. It’s being held November 3-5 in Hollywood, FL. Two action items. First, if you are in the channel and not planning to attend, think again. It’s a terrific event. Registration is here — http://www.aiim.org/Events/DMSPF/. Past the word. Second, I’m starting to work on my keynote. If you are in the channel, would be interested in your perspectives. What are the big issues facing your company? How are you dealing with them? Where do you see the biggest opportunities in the next year? Either post a comment or send me an email. Here are some of the things people said at the event last year — “In one or two sessions of this year’s DMSPEF in Nashville, I paid for the trip with the ideas and takeaways. See you next year!” Mark Zecy CEO American Micro Company “If one of the products does as I expect it will, the trip will be paid for in a few days worth of scanning. I also have some attendees coming…

In Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 we released Information Management Policy. This allowed auditing and expiration on a per content type basis. With SharePoint Server 2010 retention flexibility has been greatly increased. There are now several retention actions that can be performed out of box and it is easy to trigger custom workflows. The biggest new feature is the ability to do location based retention (set retention by folder), which opens new options for hierarchical file plans. You can also do multi stage retention as well.

Configuring Policy

The Information Management Policy settings page can be accessed by going to the site content types gallery, selecting a content type, and clicking on the Information management policy settings link. On the settings page you can fill in an administrative description, this is what is displayed to administrators when configuring policies. A policy statement can also be displayed, this is what will be shown to end users for example when they open a Word document they will get an information bar. There are for categories of policy: retention, auditing, barcodes, and labels. Retention allows you to specify actions that occur after a certain date. Auditing gives you options to select of operations to items that will be tracked. Barcodes and labels can be used to track documents.

Retention Actions

The retention actions include:

· Move to recycle bin

· Permanently delete The co-authoring robot added this text. Please email CyberDog if you have questions.

· Transfer to another location – You can select from configured Send To locations that will send the document to a content organizer

· Start a workflow – select from available workflows that are associated with the content type (or list in the case of location based policy)

· Skip to next stage

· Declare record – this will mark the item a record using the new in place records feature. At the site collection level you can specify whether a record should be treated as a normal item, block delete, or block edit and delete. In order to use this action the In Place Records site collection feature must be activated.

· Delete previous drafts

· Delete all versions

In the events section you will notice that you can select columns, and there is a disabled option to set a custom retention formula. This option is available if a custom retention formula has been installed on the server. You can check out the article Creating a Custom Expiration Formula Based on Metadata in SharePoint Server for more information about creation a custom retention formula.

Content Type Based and Location Based Retention

With SharePoint Server 2010 you can configure content type or location based retention. Content type based retention lets you specify that all items of a particular content type will follow a retention schedule. To specify a retention stage go to the information management policy settings page, which can be accessed from the main settings page for a content type. From there you can click on the enable button for retention and add new stages. It is important to note that pages, blogs, and wikis are content types that can have policy as well as documents.

Retention can also be specified by library and folder. To do this navigate to the list you would like to configure retention for, go to the list settings page and then click the link for information management policy settings. By default items will follow content type based retention. To change the retention schedule source click the change source link. Now all items in this list will follow the retention schedule that is specified for this list, rather than whatever is specified for the content type. To the left of the screen there is a tree control that can be used to navigate the folders in the list. You can use this control to select different folders to specify a retention schedule for that particular folder and all folders beneath it.

Folders inherit location policy from their parent. At the list level I can set a retention schedule for all items to expire 5 years after created date. All items in the list will receive then expire after 5 years. For the Confidential folder I need to retain items for 7 years, so now any items inside the confidential folder (including any new folders) will now expire at 7 years.

You can also set multi stage retention schedules. Let’s say that after a document has not been modified for more than 90 days previous versions will not be needed, so to save space I want all previous drafts to be deleted (because each version takes is the full size of the document, 10 versions means 10 times the space may be taken up). Also I do not want documents cluttering up this library because it is a collaborative space. After 1 year documents are no longer needed, but they do need to be retained for 7 years due to legal compliance reasons. I can set a second stage to send all documents to a record center after 1 year.

SharePoint Server 2010 provides greatly improved capabilities and flexibility for retention of documents. A few of the major improvements include multi stage retention actions, more out of box retention actions, and location based retention. Also improvements with creating workflows with SharePoint Designer make it much easier to create custom workflows to create retention actions to solve your needs.

Quentin Christensen

Program Manager, Document and Records Management

In Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 we released Information Management Policy. This allowed auditing and expiration on a per content type basis. With SharePoint Server 2010 retention flexibility has been greatly increased. There are now several retention actions that can be performed out of box and it is easy to trigger custom workflows. The biggest new feature is the ability to do location based retention (set retention by folder), which opens new options for hierarchical file plans. You can also do multi stage retention as well.

Configuring Policy

The Information Management Policy settings page can be accessed by going to the site content types gallery, selecting a content type, and clicking on the Information management policy settings link. On the settings page you can fill in an administrative description, this is what is displayed to administrators when configuring policies. A policy statement can also be displayed, this is what will be shown to end users for example when they open a Word document they will get an information bar. There are for categories of policy: retention, auditing, barcodes, and labels. Retention allows you to specify actions that occur after a certain date. Auditing gives you options to select of operations to items that will be tracked. Barcodes and labels can be used to track documents.

Retention Actions

The retention actions include:

· Move to recycle bin

· Permanently delete

· Transfer to another location – You can select from configured Send To locations that will send the document to a content organizer

· Start a workflow – select from available workflows that are associated with the content type (or list in the case of location based policy)

· Skip to next stage

· Declare record – this will mark the item a record using the new in place records feature. At the site collection level you can specify whether a record should be treated as a normal item, block delete, or block edit and delete. In order to use this action the In Place Records site collection feature must be activated.

· Delete previous drafts

· Delete all versions

In the events section you will notice that you can select columns, and there is a disabled option to set a custom retention formula. This option is available if a custom retention formula has been installed on the server. You can check out the article Creating a Custom Expiration Formula Based on Metadata in SharePoint Server for more information about creation a custom retention formula.

Content Type Based and Location Based Retention

With SharePoint Server 2010 you can configure content type or location based retention. Content type based retention lets you specify that all items of a particular content type will follow a retention schedule. To specify a retention stage go to the information management policy settings page, which can be accessed from the main settings page for a content type. From there you can click on the enable button for retention and add new stages. It is important to note that pages, blogs, and wikis are content types that can have policy as well as documents.

Retention can also be specified by library and folder. To do this navigate to the list you would like to configure retention for, go to the list settings page and then click the link for information management policy settings. By default items will follow content type based retention. To change the retention schedule source click the change source link. Now all items in this list will follow the retention schedule that is specified for this list, rather than whatever is specified for the content type. To the left of the screen there is a tree control that can be used to navigate the folders in the list. You can use this control to select different folders to specify a retention schedule for that particular folder and all folders beneath it.

Folders inherit location policy from their parent. At the list level I can set a retention schedule for all items to expire 5 years after created date. All items in the list will receive then expire after 5 years. For the Confidential folder I need to retain items for 7 years, so now any items inside the confidential folder (including any new folders) will now expire at 7 years.

You can also set multi stage retention schedules. Let’s say that after a document has not been modified for more than 90 days previous versions will not be needed, so to save space I want all previous drafts to be deleted (because each version takes is the full size of the document, 10 versions means 10 times the space may be taken up). Also I do not want documents cluttering up this library because it is a collaborative space. After 1 year documents are no longer needed, but they do need to be retained for 7 years due to legal compliance reasons. I can set a second stage to send all documents to a record center after 1 year.

SharePoint Server 2010 provides greatly improved capabilities and flexibility for retention of documents. A few of the major improvements include multi stage retention actions, more out of box retention actions, and location based retention. Also improvements with creating workflows with SharePoint Designer make it much easier to create custom workflows to create retention actions to solve your needs.

Quentin Christensen

Program Manager, Document and Records Management

SharePoint Server 2010 unleashes new features such as managed metadata and metadata navigation that make metadata even more important. But a big problem for many SharePoint projects is getting metadata onto documents. It is important to consider the tradeoff of metadata vs. user tax. As the number of metadata columns that must be filled in increases it becomes less likely that users will fill in metadata because it is that much additional work to go through and see which columns actually apply. If a large amount of required columns are used then user adoption may be slow because it is so taxing to upload content. In a very open and collaborative scenario this can be detrimental. But as the value of the content and effort to create that content increases, it becomes more likely that users will take the time to fill in the appropriate fields, especially when this operation is not frequent.

For any SharePoint project you should carefully consider what metadata will be needed to perform required operations and for users to find content. Evaluate how long it will take users to fill in that metadata, and evaluate the user impact. If lots of metadata is required but end users do not adopt the system because the overhead for creating content is high it will be difficult to have a successful implementation.

Metadata defaults help with this problem because you can automatically fill in metadata for users. If a particular field will have the same value 50% or more of the time then you should specify a metadata default to help users fill in forms faster. Metadata defaults can be specified for each column at the site level, list level, and folder level. Metadata defaults inherit from each other and the child default will always override. For example if a default is set on a folder and there are defaults for the list and the site column, the default for the folder will be applied. If there are defaults for a column and a list, but no default for a folder then when an item is added to that folder it will get the list default. When users create or upload a new item the metadata default will be applied and be displayed in the edit properties form. The user can then change the property as needed. By planning for and setting metadata defaults early it will be easier to evaluate what the metadata defaults should be and how they can be used to help make it easier to get metadata applied to items.

Metadata defaults are supported on the following column types:

· Single Line of Text

· Choice

· Number

· Currency

· Date and Time The co-authoring robot added this text. Please email CyberDog if you have questions.

· Yes/no

· Managed Metadata

Setting metadata defaults when editing columns:

When creating or editing a column at the site or list level there is a field to specify a default value. You can specify defaults at the site level, and then override them at the list level.

Setting metadata defaults with the tree control: The co-authoring robot added this text. Please email CyberDog if you have questions.

In libraries you can use a tree control to set metadata defaults for the library and per folder. To do this go to library settings and click on the link “Column default value settings”. This will give you a tree control that you can use to navigate the folders in the library. You can set defaults at the root of the library as well as for each individual folder. Folders will inherit default values unless you specify a particular default value for the child folder.

Metadata defaults are a great way to help place metadata on columns. You can even use it to apply defaults on hidden columns so users never even have the option to edit the field, but they can use the metadata to navigate and retrieve content.

Quentin Christensen

Program Manager, Document and Records Management