Archiving has an important place in the management of information. From a records management perspective, information should only be archived if it has historical significance and should be kept forever. There should be a corporate retention policy that tells users when documents need to be destroyed or when they need to be offered to the archive for permanent storage. It is not necessary or desirable to keep everything, what is necessary and desirable is that users manage the information they have in the correct way.

What we are doing to implement this is to go through network fileshares with the users and help them to identify what information they need and what can be destroyed in line with the corporate retention policy. We then work with them to classify and organise their information into a logical fileplan, migrate their data into this new fileplan. We lock down the old file structure and leave it in lace for 3 months after which it gets deleted. The new file structure is migrated into SharePoint and the network share is deleted. Users then use SharePoint libraries to store, share and manage their information.

 We are also looking at integrating our EDRMS with SharePoint to bring the rigour of compliance to our information storage so that it removes the need for users to remember what metadata to apply to documents.

Steve