From the course: SharePoint Online Admin Essential Training

Records management and data retention - SharePoint Online Tutorial

From the course: SharePoint Online Admin Essential Training

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Records management and data retention

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- [Instructor] Let's dive a little deeper into records management, content management, and data retention. I'll start with a definition. Records management is an organizational function devoted to the management of information in an organization throughout its lifecycle, from the time of creation or inscription to its eventual disposition. This includes identifying, classifying, storing, securing, retrieving, tracking, and destroying or permanently preserving records. As the amount of data that companies need to handle continues to grow, records management becomes more and more important. Effective management provides ways for companies to not just store data but to use it effectively for analysis and forecasting. It enables cost savings and increased productivity by making data available and by helping to prevent duplication of data and it helps companies abide by internal, local, national, and international rules of governance and legal requirements. Records management is a key component in a content management tool like SharePoint. The most difficult part of records management is all the thought that needs to go into setting it up. The first step is to define all the different content you need to manage by category and type. Now this is going to be a collaborative effort. You really need to have leadership and the O 365 admin involved as well as any stakeholder who needs to manage their records. For instance, do you need to keep financial records? If yes, what types? Invoices? Statements? Purchase orders? What about intellectual property? Once again if yes, what types of records are there? Design documents? Test results? What else? The fact is every company will have different requirements and different types of content they need to manage. This can be a time consuming exercise, but it's an important one so take the time to be thorough. Step two is to define the retention rules for all the different types of content. Where there are regulatory requirements, this is easy. If there aren't any laws or other governance in place, you'll need to make some decisions. Does the content need to be retired at some point? Will it need to be permanently archived or can it be deleted after a period of time? You might also consider making a rule for content which hasn't been accessed for a while, maybe a couple of years, to be automatically archived. Anyways, the goal is to have everything mapped out and defined and this will make the actual implementation much much easier.

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