Not a generic SharePoint post today, but a Governance thing I saw at a client and made me say “why didn’t I think of that before ? “.
Every piece of information used in an organisation has some kind of storage time: contracts, proposals, meeting minutes,…
You don’t want to keep these lingering around forever, polluting your search and views.
SharePoint Content Types lets you add a information policy with an expiration date. When that date is reached, the system has to do something.
Most of the time, it is the legal department that needs to set such dates. And what about documents or other information that are not kept in Content types?
A client of mine had a list (kept in SharePoint, but could be any system really) that stated a lot of information types and their storage time. That list was kept in their “Governance site”, that contained all their information about the governance of the information systems.
So, if you have a Governance site, which I sincerely suggest you have or create, add a simple list with 2 fields: “type of information” and “storage time”.
Your users will thank you.
Hi Marijn,
I like this concept but do have a question about it
I am an advocate of not having quotas on your site collection, but information management /retention policies. see http://www.officeandbusiness.be/quota
Now, in this post you write about a type of information and a storage time.
Is there any (automated) process (archive, offload to BLOB, delete,…) attached to that storage time or type of inforrmation? And how does this then work?
Pat
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for your response!
The list in this post (for this client) only acted as a way of communicating those storage times. They are not linked with any functionality, just a representation of legal information.
Just like you, I don’t like quotas. The automated process that you will install will be on content-type level, which works great in SharePoint. But that information is most likely not communicated clearly to the business users, so they don’t know when certain documents are going to dissapear or how long they need to keep certain information. This list makes up for that.