Records Management is one of the primary utilities of SharePoint as an Enterprise Content Management System. One of the out of the box feature of SharePoint that supports record management is being able to use a predefined Record Center Site Collection template. Record center serves as the central location, where the organization can store and manage its documents.
The Records Center site template helps in creating a pre-defined site, which has been specifically modified for record management and retention. In this article, we will see how to get started with a Record Center and what are the common use cases for the Record Center.
Getting started
SharePoint Online has a site template, which can be used to create the Record Center. From SharePoint Online Admin Center, click New to create the Record Center.
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Specify the field values given below in the site collection creation page
- Title- The Record Center name
- Web Site Address- URL for the Record Center
- Template Selection- From Enterprise tab, select Records Center.
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- Time Zone- Specify the time zone that will be used in the site template.
- Administrator- Mention the site collection administrator for the site.
- Server Resource Quota- Allocate the resources quota, which will be used by the site collection.
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On clicking OK, it will start provisioning the Record Center site collection.
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Heading over to the URL, we can see the newly created Record Center.
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Record Center offers various features, as shown below.
- Information Management Policy
Auditing and retention are two useful information management policies provided by Record Center.
- Auditing
It logs the events that take place within the Record Center such as who is viewing which documents, so that meaningful analysis can be derived from it.
- Expiration
Once the document is submitted, we can define how long a record should be retained and what should happen, once the record reaches the retention period like triggering of an archival Workflow.
- Vault
The safety and integrity of the stored records within Record Center are maintained by its vault like capabilities.
- Changes to the record are tracked by versioning of not only the records but also by maintaining versions to the metadata of the document.
- Record Routing
Content Organizer which is present within the record center can automatically route the documents to their location, based on the record type.
- Record Hold
Hold is a part of e-Discovery by which we can search for the documents that match a condition and keep a hold on the documents for a period of time. The users can still work on the content but a copy of the content at the time needs to be kept when the hold that was initialized is preserved.
Summary
Thus, we saw the basics of Record Center in SharePoint Online. We will see more about document routing and retention management in an upcoming article.