SharePoint 2010 Records Management and Retention

SharePoint 2010 enables organizations to integrate records management into any SharePoint site. Shown here is a document library with two documents that illustrates some of the available features. The Compliance Details pane for the first document, which the user called up by clicking a drop-down menu, shows that the document is subject to a two-stage retention policy: if a document remains unchanged for three months, it is copied to a Records Center site for long-term retention; after a year, it is deleted. This policy will be applied by default to all documents of the DOMReport content type.

However, the current user has permissions to exempt the document from the policy. The user could also declare the document a record or place a legal hold on it, each of which would typically protect the document from modification and deletion and subject it to a different retention policy. SharePoint’s new context-sensitive Ribbon, shown at the top, also has commands to declare documents and other content to be records.