Working with records in SharePoint

SharePoint provides a variety of tools to help with records management. So what is is a record in SharePoint? Records can be different types of files. Like Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, even webpages, Wiki pages, or blog posts, among other types of content. But essentially, a record is a type of content that you want to treat in a special way. For example, you might need to block it's deletion or dispose of it on a certain schedule.

Let's look at some examples. You might have some employee, medical, and student records that you need to handle in a special way. You might have legal documents like leases and contracts, that you need to make sure you store officially. You might have intellectual property, like reports or patent materials. You may need to keep official tabs on these items and be able to keep them from being changed. You might have formal guidelines, like safety guidelines or operating procedures.

Or you might need to hold on to information that's required by your industry or a regulatory agency. For example, you might have compliance requirements to hold onto certain types of content for a defined period. So why treat content as a record? You can prevent changes or deletions to it. For example, you don't want someone to accidentally delete an important record from a library. When you save content as a record, you can prevent it's deletion or it's modification, and even the library itself can't be deleted.

We have content that's declared as a record in it. You can also streamline the retrieval of content. For example, you might need to respond to a legal request or get a freedom of information inquiry, in which you need to produce a specific type of content. When you treat content as a record, you can keep better tabs on it. You can also define how long to retain content. You can set up schedules to retain different types of content in SharePoint. But you can define different schedules for records and make sure that you hold onto the content for the right period of time and then dispose of it when it's no longer needed.

If you're like a lot of organizations, you may have extra copies of different projects and guidelines laying around, and it might be hard to find just the right official document. You can declare your official documents as records and then define a schedule for getting rid of content that isn't a record. You can also manage the records lifecycle in stages. For example, a document might be created and then you can declare it as a record where people are working on it if you need to, and then it can be sent to a record sender archive.

And then it can be disposed of on a certain schedule. Managing content as records can be a key part of your content and business strategy.