Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

12.3. Information Management Policy

Office SharePoint Server 2007 makes it possible to establish explicit rules for governing information management through the use of Information Management Policy Features. By implementing a Policy Feature, you can control what happens to selected information as it moves through the enterprise. This is particularly important for records management solutions, where regulatory compliance is driving the solution development effort.

Figure 12-17 shows the Information Management Policy architecture within the Office SharePoint Server 2007 system.

Figure 12.17. Figure 12-17

You create a policy by implementing one or more policy features and then adding them to the global policy catalog for the SharePoint Server Farm. Each feature can be associated with one or more policy resources, which it consumes in response to events it receives through the IPolicyFeature interface.

12.3.1. Creating a Custom Policy Feature

It is important to understand that Policy Features are attached to content types and are called to act on list items which are instances of the associated content types. Thus, the lifecycle for a Policy Feature includes the following steps:

1. The Policy Feature assembly is registered in the global policy catalog.

2. The Policy Feature is registered for a given content type. The feature can register custom event receivers for the list or perform other ...