Digital Document Retention and

SharePoint

Four Questions

•How do we use SharePoint?

•Organising your content

•Naming your content

•Taking content offline

How Do We Use SharePoint?

•How much of your SharePoint content do you regularly look at?

•How often do others look at the content you share in SharePoint?

How Do We Use SharePoint?

•You can delete stuff from SharePoint too!

•If you (and others) aren’t referring to your content, then SharePoint might not be the right place for it.

•Refer to retention guidelines first

Organising Your Content

•Stick with two libraries

•One for Private documents (your team only)

•One for Public documents (reference for everyone else)

Organising Your Content

•Not ‘your’ folders, but ‘our’ folders

•Establish a simple folder hierarchy

•Maintain the hierarchy

•Consider the needs of others in using your Public Document Library

Naming Your Content

Source: University of Edinburgh Records Management Office: http://www.recordsmanagement.ed.ac.uk/InfoStaff/RMstaff/RMprojects/PP/FileNameRules/Rules.htm

•Keep file names short and meaningful

•Keep repetition of files and names to a minimum

•Avoid common words like ‘draft’ and ‘letter’

•Name your files in a way that makes retrieval easy...

Naming Your Content

Source: University of Edinburgh Records Management Office: http://www.recordsmanagement.ed.ac.uk/InfoStaff/RMstaff/RMprojects/PP/FileNameRules/Rules.htm

•Use Capital Letters to delimit words; spaces and underscores are also okay

•Use two-digit numbers, i.e. 01 - 99

•State the date in reverse, i.e. YYYYMMDD

•Order the elements of the name in the most appropriate way to retrieve the record

Taking Your Content Offline

•For when you don’t need instant access

•Optical discs (CD or DVD) offer quick access to reasonable amounts of data

•Tape backups (facilitated by the ICT Service Desk) are best for large point-in-time snapshots

Taking Your Content Offline

•When you take your content offline, store it in one of our safes

•Media must be clearly labelled with the content type and the date of the backup

•It’s helpful if you create an index file on optical media (e.g. ‘readme.txt’)

Additional Resources

•Additional resources will be available shortly in Moodle

•Check the News and Announcements forum