Collecting records within an Enterprise can be a challenging problem for a records management team. They often have to rely on users understanding the details of their records management policy and how that applies to their day-to-day working practices.
Automating record declaration helps to relinquish this responsibility from the user, allowing them to concentrate on working with their content, whilst leaving record capture to the content managers and records management team.
In Alfresco RM v2.1 automated record declaration is achieved using Alfresco content rules.
Generally, rules can be defined on any folder within Alfresco and work in a similar way to the inbox filters you may have seen on your favorite email client.
This allows rules to be defined on a users content authoring environment that implement record capture polices and are imposed automatically without the user doing anything.
Possible examples of record declaration rules include:
all content created in a folder structure is automatically declared as a record
if content is tagged as 'important' then declare it as a record
when a case is closed then declare it as a record
once a document has been reviewed via a workflow then declare it as a record
Now the flow of records into the file plan is automatic and guaranteed, with little or no impact on the users working practices!
So where do all these records go and how does the records management team cope with the new influx of records?
In part 3 we will take a look at how we manage Unfiled Records and how automatic filling is possible.
For more information or to request a live demo of Alfresco Records Management module v2.1 visit http://www.alfresco.com/easyRM