Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

12.1. SharePoint Support for Records Management

There are five core requirements for any records management system:

• Confidentiality—Confidentiality means access control; you can establish clearly defined policies that govern who has access to official records at any time. It is the responsibility of the records repository to ensure that official records are maintained securely. This means that once a record is stored in the repository, no one can access it except those with the appropriate permissions. It is possible that this group may not include the original author of a given document.

• Information integrity—Information integrity means that official records must not be altered after they have been placed in the repository. This includes alteration of the document content as well as the document metadata. Information integrity also covers the need to continuously update records to minimize the presence of outdated or inaccurate information.

• High availability—High availability means that official records must be available at any given time to support outside processes that may have nothing to do with the core business function. This goes beyond network bandwidth and has more to do with the need to decouple the repository from other enterprise information stores so that requests for official records are not tied to other business processes.

• Adherence to policy—It is important to establish clearly defined policies that govern the way in which records are stored, and to prove that those ...