Documents and records management

Records management is the process of identifying which documents need to be retained by your company as corporate records and developing retention schedules that identify the reasons a record is being kept, how long it must be kept, and who can authorize its final disposition. Records management ensures that important records are kept available over appropriate periods of time for reference by your internal users or by external auditors. Records management can also define additional security for the documents (and their properties) to ensure that only approved users have access to vital business data and to ensure that the data cannot be changed once it becomes a record. In most cases, governmental compliance regulations and corporate guidelines determine what items must be records and how records are organized, classified, and retained.

Your site administrator can configure Workplace or Workplace XT to work with the optional Records Manager application. From Workplace or Workplace XT, you can identify a document that should be a corporate record. Records Manager then applies additional properties and security to the document and files it in additional folder locations that you specified during the Declare as Record procedure. The original owner of the document and other users might no longer have the same access rights on the document after it becomes a record.

To make the process of correctly identifying records simpler, your administrator can create Declare As Record entry templates for your site. A template can provide a predefined record category or location and property values to streamline the process of identifying records.

If your document has more than one version, you have several choices for how to create the record for the document series:

Once Records Manager has been configured for your site, users who are members of the Declare as Record access role see the Declare As Record button on the confirmation page when adding or checking in a document. The Declare As Record and Declare Versions As Record actions are listed in the Information page and the pop-up menu for document versions that have not already been declared as records.

A document version can only be declared as a record once. To determine if a version has already been declared as a record, do one of the following actions:

NOTE  If you see Declare as Record in the pop-up menu of a document you just declared, refresh the menu by clicking the last item in the path.

Compound documents

When declaring a document, be aware that there can be issues if the document is part of a compound document. When adding child documents to parents, settings can be specified that interfere with the normal disposition schedule of related documents. A setting that prevents any document (parent or child) from being deleted can interfere with the normal schedule of deleting documents when they are due to be deleted. Similarly, specifying that a child document is to be deleted when its parent is deleted can interfere with the normal disposition process of the child document. See Configuring Records Manager for details about the consequences of various settings.

Since the compound document parent has a special icon, you can easily identify it and explore its children and their links prior to declaring them as records. Note that with the appropriate modify properties rights, additional children can be added to a parent document later, after you've already declared it as a record. You can also change the settings associated with a child document. (To do this select Modify Child instead of Link Info in the following procedure.)

Child documents do not have a special icon. To prevent unintended consequences, we suggest that you:

  1. Click the Get Info icon of other existing documents before declaring them them as records.
  2. Select the Parent Documents view.
  3. If there is a parent, click its Get Info icon.
  4. Select its Child Documents view.
  5. From the action menu of the child document you are planning to declare as a record, select Link Info.
  6. Note the settings for Delete when Parent deleted and Prevent delete.
  7. Refer to Configuring Records Manager to decide whether you should declare this document as a record.
To declare a document as a record

Do one of the following actions to start the Declare As Record wizard:

Click Help as needed on succeeding steps.