Policy Features in SharePoint Server 2010 (ECM)

  • Article

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

In this article
Expiration
Auditing
Document Labels
Document Bar Codes

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 includes four information management policy features to help you manage your content: expiration, auditing, document labels, and document bar codes.

Expiration

As part of a company's records management process, SharePoint Server 2010 helps retain information for fixed periods of time. At the end of the content's life, the expiration policy feature can dispose of content in a consistent way that can be tracked and managed. For example, you can set content that is assigned a specified content type to expire on a specific date, within a certain amount of time after the document was created or last modified, or based on a workflow activity or some other event.

After the document expires, you can determine the actions that the policy control takes. For example, the policy can delete the document, or define a workflow task to have SharePoint Server 2010 route the document for permission to destroy it. In addition, the expiration policy feature provides the capability for you to build and use a custom plug-in action to be performed on the item after it reaches its expiration date.

For more information about workflows, see Workflows in SharePoint Foundation in the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 SDK.

Auditing

SharePoint Server 2010 provides an auditable system of record. As such, SharePoint Server 2010 automatically logs events and activities performed by SharePoint Server 2010, custom solutions, and users. This auditing feature is available for documents and for list items that are not part of a document, such as items in task lists, issues lists, discussion groups, and calendars. The auditing feature logs information for events such as the following:

  • Each access to an item

  • Each view of an item within a list

  • Each check-in and check-out of a document

  • Any changes to permissions and settings

  • The time a specified item was deleted and by whom

Users can query SharePoint Server 2010 and assemble reports of this and other event information, as needed.

Programmatically, developers can use Web services to query the SharePoint Server 2010 object model for audit information.

You can also use the Auditing object model to write custom events to the audit log. For example, you might develop a custom code solution that runs on top of SharePoint Server 2010, and write custom events that audit actions taken within that solution.

Document Labels

The document label feature and the bar code feature are designed to assist you to organize your documents for systematic storage and retrieval. You can use either feature to assign a unique label to a document, whether the document is a physical copy or electronic file, which enables you to track it.

Document labels are text labels that you can have SharePoint Server 2010 generate automatically based on a content type's metadata. For example, a law firm might want to attach a document label consisting of client name, subject matter, and date assigned to each document of a given content type.

You can print and affix document labels to a physical copy of the document, or insert them as images into a Microsoft Office 2010 document.

Document Bar Codes

Document bar codes are similar to document labels, but instead of text, they are a generated unique ID. You can print and affix the bar code to a physical copy of the document, or insert it as an image into an Office 2010 document. You can also extend and customize the format of the bar code.

See Also

Reference

Policy

Expiration

PolicyAudit

PolicyLabel

Barcode