This article applies only to on-premises installations of SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint’s ‘Records Centre’ was, in theory, a place to send records from various sites for long term storage, sentencing and disposal. The idea was that you could automatically, via Content Type rules, or directly, via the ‘Send to Records Centre’ option, transfer records out of team (and other) sites into the Records Centre.
While the theory made sense, in practice there were several problems with the model, not the least being that ‘transferred’ records were not actually transferred but copied and effectively re-registered as new records in the Records Centre. They also lost previous versions, and so on.
We needed to find another way to manage the sentencing and disposal of records. SharePoint 2013 has the (information management) option to apply a sentence on an entire site, which is great if you want to do that, but in most cases the requirement is to sentence parts of a site, including whole libraries or lists.
As our document-based records are stored in document libraries, and these libraries generally (but not always) have names that make sense (if you can stop people using the generic ‘Shared Documents’ default library), it seemed a good idea to focus on how we could apply retention and disposal policies to document libraries.
The first problem is visibility of all those libraries, created across multiple site collections. The only way to see all of them was to be the SharePoint Administrator or have Site Collection Administration privileges across all sites. But it was cumbersome to have to open every site to see what was stored in them.
I put this problem to our SharePoint Administrator and developer (Eric Fang – blog here: http://fangdahai.blogspot.com.au/) . Using PowerShell scripts, Eric developed a method to display all document libraries across all Sharepoint sites in a list. The list updates on a regular basis.
NOTE: You cannot create this type of list ‘out of the box’, it requires PowerShell scripts, and that will need to be maintained over time. This is not a skill that is normally found with most SharePoint Administrators.
The list displays:
- The library GUID
- The library name and URL
- The site collection and sites, including URLs
- The number of items stored in each library
- The date the library was created and who created it
- The date any item in the library was last modified
The first, immediate, benefit we could see from this method of displaying libraries was the number of libraries that had been created but not used. We could immediately see the ability to reduce the number of libraries, especially if these had not been used for a given period (say, one year).
The next benefit was the ability to group libraries by site collection. As many of our site collections map to business functions, we could start to see the volume of content that was stored for each function, by library – many of which were created to store documents created through various activities.
For example, a common document library is ‘Meetings’. We can now filter the view to see all libraries that contain documents relating to meetings. We can also see types of libraries that have specific retention and disposal requirements.
While the list of all libraries has provided an excellent way to view all our libraries, we are now working on a method to apply retention and disposal actions to these libraries. One way to do this would be to add an extra column in the list for retention and disposal information (class number, class decription, disposal action, expected disposal date, approved by, etc).
Once a disposal action had been applied to the list, we can then review it when the disposal action became due to determine if the library could in fact be destroyed. If it can be destroyed, it would be possible to export the original library metadata columns to a spreadsheet to keep a record of what was destroyed, and when.
Records about the world 