Making documents as Records and Approach for its Management

Question

I am having a requirement to make the documents/items in my doc lib,lists as records after 8 months is reached[from the date of document creation] in my publishing site collection. But the issue is, I need to provide access to these documents when requested/on-demand in the SharePoint portal. I have followed the below approach:

• create a record center and configure the policy for document
  expiration.
• once the document reaches the 8 months interval,document automaticalled moves to Record Center site collec.

Will this approach work? How to achieve this? Because as far record center site collec. is concerned, you cant Edit those documents once its marked it as record/archived. [ please correct me if am wrong].

Any other approaches for accessing/downloading those documents when its marked as record in record center site collec.

Can I ask the question to customer like: Why do you need to access the documents that are archived/ mark it as a record?

Answer 1

Would the customer be willing to use 'In Place Records Management' instead? This post is helpful in giving some description as to what In Place Records Management would entail.

It sounds as though the requirement is for a single document library - in which case you can configure this in Document Library Settings/Information management policy settings/Library and Folders/add retention stage/Modified Date + 8 months/Action - select 'Declare Record'.

To address your question on 'who can edit a record' - go to Site Collection Admin/Record Declaration Settings - here you can define what I will call your 'Records Managers' i.e. the users who can edit/delete records. You can also customise this at the document library level if you decide not to inherit the site collection settings.

This MS post should be of use to you on In Place Records Management - it also details the Features which need activating.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

David