Retention Policy for document library in SharePoint 2010

Retention Policy for document library in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint is emerging as an enterprise level content management system. Usually enterprises load all the records to the ECM system. Most of the records are not relevant after a few years. These documents need to be removed from the ECM System. Over the years SharePoint is emerging as an Enterprise ECM and it allows its users to easily setting up document retention policies. Retention policy specifies how a document is disposed.
One of the major improvements in SharePoint 2010 compared to prior version is the improvements in information management policies. SharePoint 2010 can apply the expiration policy in multiple stages, where each stage can do some specific actions such as deleting draft versions, deleting previous versions , deleting the record etc. In SharePoint 2010 you can apply the retention policy to a content type, to a list or document library, to a folder.
For the purpose of this Article, I am going to demonstrate how you can create your own retention policies. I have a document Library named “MyDocuments”, where I want the following policies to be applied.
1. If a document is not modified for 2 year delete its previous versions
2. Any document created here to be deleted after 3 years.
Here are the steps.
Navigate to the “MyDocuments” document library where you are going do the retention policy

From the top ribbon, navigate to the Library tab, and then click on Library settings. (both are marked with red in the below screenshot)

You will be navigated to the document library settings page. Click on the Information management policy settings from this page.

By default a library will inherit its policies from the content type, so that the policies set for the content type will be applied. You can change this by overriding “Source of retention for this library” property. For the purpose of demonstration I am going to set up retention policy for “MyDocuments” library explicitly. Click on the “change source” link.

You will reach the configuration page for the retention schedule. Select the libraries and folders radio button. You will receive a warning alert stating the content type retention policy will be ignored. Click ok here.

You can see the configuration options available for document library/list here. Click on “add a retention stage" link

The stage properties dialog will appear. Here I am going to add a stage that checks the document modified date and if it is more than 2 years, delete the previous versions.

In the property window, see the first section – Event. This decides the trigger condition for the stage to do some process. By default, you will have the stage based on the date property. As I specified previously, I need to select the time period as “date modified” and in the textbox enter the value 2. In the action section, from the dropdown select “delete all previous versions”. I don’t want to repeat this stage as I will have another stage that deletes the item. So leave the checkbox unchecked. Click ok to close the property window.

The stage will be configured accordingly. Again click on the “Add a retention stage” link. This time I will add rule, if created date is greater than 3 years, delete the item. The configuration screen is as follows.

Since you are deleting the item, the recurrence option will be disabled. Click ok to create the stage. Your configured stages will be as follows.

For the records option, leave the default selection as it is. Click on the apply button, then click ok to return to the library settings page.

That’s it. Now the documents placed in “MyDocuments” library will be expired according to the above policy. The steps will be similar, if you want to apply the retention/expiration policy for content type, you need to navigate to the information policy management page of content type and then perform the above steps.


http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2010/11/11/retention-policy-for-document-library-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx

http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/uploadfile/anavijai/retention-policy-for-a-document-library-in-sharepoint-2010/

Retension Policy in Sharepoint 2010

Retension Policy in Sharepoint 2010.



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.



http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ecm/archive/2011/10/12/policy-and-retention-in-sharepoint-server-2010.aspx