Book Image

Alfresco 3 Records Management

Book Image

Alfresco 3 Records Management

Overview of this book

The Alfresco Records Management feature set is so complete that it is one of the very limited number of systems, and the only Open Source solution, that has been fully certified for Records Management use by the US Department of Defense. Record keeping is important because accurate records are really the only way that organizations can demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements. The amount of regulation that organizations must comply with has gone up dramatically over the last decade, and the complexity of record management has increased proportionally.Alfresco 3 Records Management is a complete guide for setting up records programs within organizations. The book is the first and only one that describes Alfresco's implementation of Records Management. It not only teaches the technology for implementing Records Management, but also discusses the important roles that both processes and people play in the building of a successful records program.Alfresco 3 Records Management starts with a description of the importance of record keeping, especially from a regulatory compliance perspective. It then discusses Records Management best practices and standards, and goes on to describe step by step how to identify documents that need to be managed as records, how to use Alfresco Records Management software to set up the File Plan structure for organizing the storage of records, and then how to manage the lifecycle of the records.The book provides detailed instructions for installing and configuring Alfresco Records Management. The topics covered include setting up a record File Plan, filing records, establishing record retention schedules, setting up security and permissions, assigning metadata, extending the content model, using advanced search techniques, and creating system activity audit reports. The book also provides "deep-dive" information from a developer's perspective about how the Records Management module was implemented within the Alfresco Share platform.Alfresco 3 Records Management covers features available in both the Community and Enterprise versions of Alfresco software. By the end of this book, you will be able to successfully develop a records policy and implement it within Alfresco Records Management.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Alfresco 3 Records Management
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Records Management

Specifying mandatory metadata


Prior to being declared as a record, it is first required that all mandatory metadata for an undeclared record be completed. This is a requirement of the DoD 5015.2 specification, and the reasoning behind doing it is understandable. It wouldn't be a good idea to allow records to be declared when some critical pieces of information about them are still missing.

Note

The DoD 5015.2 specification can be found on-line at http://www.js.pentagon.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/501502std.pdf. We will also discuss it in more detail in Appendix A (which is available for download from the Packt Publishing website) of this book.

However, unfortunately, the need to specify mandatory metadata can complicate the filing process. Because of the need to first specify metadata, there are, in effect, three steps needed to file and declare a record: first file the document in a File Plan Folder, complete the mandatory metadata, and then declare it as a record.

If there are many records...