Develop the file plan (Office SharePoint Server)

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

In this article:

• About records, active documents, and archived documents

• Determine what is a record

• Complete the file plan

The file plan is the primary records management planning document. Although file plans can differ across organizations, they typically:

• Describe the kinds of items the organization acknowledges to be records.

• Describe what broader category of records the items belong to.

• Indicate where records are stored.

• Describe retention periods for records.

• Delineate who is responsible for managing the various types of records.

About records, active documents, and archived documents

Before you can determine your file plan, you need to understand the differences among records, active documents, and archived documents.

• Records   These are documents or other physical or electronic entities in an organization that serve as evidence of activities or transactions performed by the organization. They must be retained for some time period so they can be produced if needed, such as for regulatory or legal discovery.

  When an active document is declared to be a record, it is moved or copied to a protected place such as a physical vault or an electronic records repository, and it is assigned a retention period that specifies how long the organization will keep it. (Note that the retention period could be permanent, meaning that the record would be retained indefinitely.) When a record's retention period is over, it is either disposed of by a records manager or moved to an archive for safekeeping as a document of historical interest.

• Active documents   These are documents in use, such as the e-mail messages in an information worker's inbox, the printed product specifications on someone's desk, the documents in a document library, or the pages on a corporate Web site. It is expected that active documents will change over time, be copied and shared, and generally move about the organization.

  Active documents may be declared as records if they serve as evidence of an activity or transaction performed by your organization. For example, if your organization provides a service that includes delivering content to a customer, then that content becomes a record of the delivery of the service and a copy of the document should be retained. Some types of active documents will never become records; for example, you might not classify an e-mail sent among coworkers to agree on where to meet for lunch as a record.

  At some point in a document's life cycle, it stops being active. For example, when a deliverable document is presented to a customer, it might no longer be necessary to keep managing this content as an active record. But if the document is a record, it should be saved and protected for some retention period.

• Archived documents   These are documents that are no longer active but are not records (either because they no longer have to be retained or because they were never classified as records). Archived documents are kept by an enterprise for non-legal reasons such as for historical preservation.

Determine what is a record

Determining which active documents in your organization might be declarable as records requires the collaboration of records managers, lawyers, compliance officers, and content managers. Note that, even if your enterprise is not in a highly regulated industry, there are general laws (such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002) that your records managers need to be aware of that might obligate your enterprise to retain records. Along with general business laws, you need to evaluate legal requirements specific to your enterprise.

It is beyond the scope of this article to provide more than general information about how to determine what is a record in your organization. Most likely, your enterprise is already doing some form of records management and has filled most of the records management roles you need, and you might already have a taxonomy of records.

Generally, to determine what are records in your organization:

1. Understand your enterprise's legal obligations and business needs.

2. In a collaborative effort across the divisions of your organization, analyze active document usage.

3. Develop a list of active document types that should become records. For example, you may determine that the following should be retained as records:

   • Contracts to rent corporate space.

   • Documents related to employees' benefits.

   • Documents related to product research and development.

4. Categorize the records.

Here is a sample worksheet:

Complete the file plan

After determining which documents should be retained as records and creating a set of record categories, complete your file plan by defining retention periods for each record category, indicating how to dispose of records when their retention periods have expired and supplying other information such as the primary records manager for each record type and the media in which the record is stored.

Here is a completed sample file plan:

Worksheet

You can use the following worksheet with this article to help plan your deployment:

• Record categories worksheet (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=73300&clcid=0x409)

Download this book

This topic is included in the following downloadable book for easier reading and printing:

• Plan Sites and Features, Part 1

See the full list of available books at Downloadable content for Office SharePoint Server 2007.