This is the second article in a series of posts on the record center in MOSS 2007.
When a document is sent to the records center it is routed to it’s final destination (a document library) by means of the routing table in the Records Centre.
By default all records will get sent to the ‘Unclassified Records’ document library. This is where all the records which have no custom routing will be stored. It also gives the records manager within the organization an opportunity to create a new routings for the unclassified documents.
The standard MOSS routing routes records based on their content type to a specified document library. Many different content types can be routed to a single document library.
This example is based on a Records Center which is a sub site of a teamsite and as such will be re-using the content types defined within the teamsite.
To start routing your own records you need to create the document libraries to store the records. These can be standard document libraries, but you need to ensure they can contain the content types (or duplicates) you wish to route to them. You can do this from the ‘Document Library Settings’ page. You first need to enable the management of content types, which is under the advanced settings of the document library.
Select yes and press OK. You will now see a new section appear on the settings page called ‘Content Types’.
This allows you to add new content types which can be stored in this document library. Add the content types you wish to route to this library here.
You can now add your new routing to the Records Center.
Here you see the documents of type ‘Agenda’ and ‘Minutes’ will be routed to the document library called ‘Meetings’. Pressing OK will add the entry to the routing table.
You can now send Agendas to the Records Center and they will be correctly routed to the Meetings document library.
When sent to the records center will appear as
You will notice several things though.
Firstly SharePoint creates a new folder in the document library to store the document, which is essentially the date and time it was created. This folder (I am reliably informed) is simply to get around the 2000 items per view limit in a document library. SharePoint will create new folders as required.
You will also see some additional letters & numbers appended to the document name. This is there to give the document a unique name so that subsequent submissions do not conflict with each other.
Finally you will see a properties folder. This contains the properties (metadata etc) of the document at the time it was submitted. It is an XML file with an entry for each property and acts as a permanent record of the document metadata.
In addition to creating the XML document containing the metadata SharePoint will also try to copy the metadata to the appropriate columns of the list item. If SharePoint can match the content type of the document with a content type allowed in the document library it will copy all the metadata to the columns of the record. The default content type for the document library if no other suitable match is found.
Using the Records Center in MOSS gives you a great starting point for handling your permanent records, but it may not be exactly what you require. To this end the routing functionality can be extended to provide your own custom routing. This custom routing can then be combined with other WSS, SharePoint and MOSS features to enable you to customise the processing to your exact requirements. A number of examples include...
- Adding workflow to the original document library which automatically submits the document when it is checked in, removing the manual process from the end-user.
- Using policies to enforce automatic expiration of documents after a set period of time.
- Routing records based on metadata, not content type and even storing them outside of SharePoint if required.
The next article will show how to extend the custom routing within MOSS by using the IRouter interface, and will also provide a sample class which routes documents to specific folders within a document library, completely replacing the default processing.