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SharePoint Retention Policies

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SharePoint Document and Retention Policies

Kattelo completed another successful session of SharePoint Office Hours, with quite a bang and after-hour humor. Once again, the Kattelo team was able to come out and help many SharePoint users during our July SharePoint Office Hours. We hope that you were able to join us and take away some SharePoint knowledge from the discussion with us.

SharePoint Records Center

One of the topics discussed was the concept of retention. As users add more and more documents to SharePoint, the document libraries become larger and harder to organize and to search. To prevent a document library black hole, the site administrator may want to create a separate Records Center subsite that will serve as an archive for unused and older documents.
The retention policy can be set at the content type level by

  1. Site Settings > Site Content Types
  2. Information Management Policy Settings > Retention

In that location there are settings to add stages of retention that automatically happen after a certain time. This way, documents of a particular type can automatically be declared a record after a set period of time, and then sent off to the Records Center subsite to be stored there. You can even set settings to automatically delete documents after a set period, saving you time