Technology Tips -

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Evidence of an activity executed by organization is called a record, and record management is the mechanism of maintaining the records of  an organization from the time they are created up to their disposal. In other word records management is the mechanism of determining the type of information should be considered as a record than a document.
If you want to understand sharepoint record management with a simple example -let's say your organization deals in cars manufacturing, every year management issues a new car price list and according to the policy it changes every year – because you see when you purchase Toyota in 2008 and want to buy again in 2009 it’s price probably changed, so the bottom line is- car price changes every Year. So how to handle this issue? Means very difficult to handle new car price which has to be issued in 2009- so  Management basically declares 2008 car price list as record if you are working with sharepoint- I think sharepoint will give you great feature for record management. So just have to click on a car price list 2008 and declare it as a record- now what happens, once you declare it as a record – nobody can make changes in car price list 2008 once it is declared as record- this is the basic difference between document and record management. Although current working copy is editable – but through some coding logic you can delete that 2008 car price list automatically from workspace. Once you declare 2008 care price list as record so your organization record managers have access to record vault developed in sharepoint and it will give you entire audit trail who has access this records.

Sharepoint will make your life much easier, new car price for 2009 issues management starts working on it and they collaborate it and finally archive back into repository.
To achieve this functionality you have to be a jack of sharepoint- define content type and define routing table and things get going. Define document library for care price in sharepoint workspace, store care price for editing there- then define content type and create a document library in Record Repository site and define routing table as well. Now few more steps at Sharepoint Centeral Admin home page then – it’s done.

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