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 XT to work with the optional IBM® InfoSphere™ Enterprise Records application. (IBM InfoSphere Enterprise Records was previously called IBM FileNet® Records Manager.) From Workplace XT, you can identify a document that should be a corporate record. IBM InfoSphere 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:
Once IBM InfoSphere 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: