Records Center Illustrated Primer - Part I
So you have people at your company storing their documents in SharePoint, are versioning them, and are creating Content Types to help pair metadata to document data and make search more effective. You have things organized into Document Libraries. Then comes the news that you need to comply with [21 CFR Part 11, Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel, fill in your favorite regulation/compliance program here]. You decide on training, retention policies, a rollout procedures, make a checklist for compliance steps, etc. and now want to start leveraging Records Center to manage document lifecycles. There are some resources you can search for, and the best one I saw for listing the steps for setting up Records Center was at http://mdablog.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!B0C40902E1212960!379.entry. I liked this one a lot, but wanted to take it one step further by providing a complete example with screen shots along the way. Approximately 39 screen shots later, we have this series of posts.
Before you begin:
- Have your Document Libraries and Content Types set up if possible.
- Decide your retention policies
- Make sure you don't already have a Record Center set up (only one allowed per SharePoint Farm)
- Prefer to try doing this first in a virtual/test environment, before production
- Consider bringing in people with experience planning and developing compliance implementations for other companies using SharePoint to help (call us!)
Now the steps to do it, thanks to Marc Anderson's blog for the most complete instructions out there!
1. You need to create a site for Records Center documents to be routed to. There will be one of these per Farm as mentioned above. Start at your top-level home site and create a site - Site Actions - Create, then Sites and Workspaces link
Click Create on the left
Use the Records Center Template, which is under the Enterprise group. Give your Record Center a name (Records Center, Record Center, etc) and URL.
2. You need to create the Policy for managing the documents. Go to the top level site settings
Click on Site Collection Policies
Click Create to create a new policy.
Include a name, description, statement, and indicate any auditing that should happen for the document.
Scroll down and set expiration time/action, and barcode policy if applicable (to help you stay in sync with printed versions of your documents).
3. If you have not created your Content Types yet, here is an example of doing so. Navigate to your top level home site, and click Site Actions - Site Settings and choose under Galleries, Site content types
In the Site Content Type Gallery, click Create
Think of Content Types like subclasses in object oriented programming. You hang them off of a "superclass" like Document, and further refine them to add attributes using columns. Here we create a Content Type called Analysis Document, which will be a Word Doc that has a couple pieces of metadata (columns) that hang off it, Title and Origin. First we create the Content Type
Then we click on Add From new site column to create our Origin column
We'll create a drop-down list called Origin that details how the Analysis document was created - internally at Syrinx, provided by a client, produced by a subcontractor or other vendor on the project, or "other".
Now our Content Type is all set.
In the next installment of the series, we'll start with creating the Document Library in the Records Center to hold our incoming documents.