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 to work with the optional IBM Enterprise Records application. From Workplace, you can identify a document that should be a corporate record. IBM Enterprise Records 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:
- You can declare the entire version series as a single record. If you later create additional versions of the document, the newer versions must be declared separately. New versions are not automatically added to an existing record.
- You can declare specific versions in the series as a single record. For example, you might decide to declare only the major versions of a document as a single record.
- You can declare each version as a separate record. You must run the Declare as Record wizard for each version that you declare as a record.
Once IBM Enterprise Records 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:
- Right-click the document title and see if Declare as Record is on the pop-up menu. If not, the document has already been declared.
- Display the information pages. If the document has a Record Properties view, that version has been declared as a record. The version is displayed at the top of the information page. Also, the Declare as Record option is not on the Actions list in the left panel for declared documents.
- In the Properties view of the information page for the document, click Show System Properties. If the System Properties include a value for Record Information, that version of the document has already been declared as a record.
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 (including DITA 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 IBM Enterprise Records for details about the consequences of various settings.
NOTE Any application making use of DITA file functionality creates the components as compound documents; therefore the rules that apply to compound documents also apply to DITA files.
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, as well as 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:
- Click the Get Info icon of other existing documents before declaring them them as records.
- Select the Parent Documents view.
- If there is a parent, click its Get Info icon.
- Select its Child Documents view.
- From the action menu of the child document you are planning to declare as a record, select Link Info.
- Note the settings for Delete when Parent deleted and Prevent delete.
- Refer to Configuring IBM Enterprise Records to decide whether you should declare this document as a record.
Do one of the following actions to start the Declare As Record wizard:
- From the Confirmation page at the end of the Add Document or Check In wizard, click Declare As Record.
- Use Browse or Search to locate the document. Right-click the document name to open the pop-up menu, and then select Declare As Record or Declare Versions As Record.
- From the information page for a document, click Declare As Record or Declare Versions As Record in the list of actions.
Click Help as needed on succeeding steps.
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