Professional SharePoint® 2007 Records Management Development: Managing Official Records with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007

Chapter 2. Preparing for Records Management Development

There are some basic considerations that come into play when building a solution that will support records management activities. The first things to think about are the roles involved in the overall workflow. The business processes for records management may include collaborative workflows, but they may also include other workflows that are driven by compliance needs or auditing needs and that generally involve closer oversight and have stricter rules associated with them. So in this chapter, you'll see some of the key roles that are involved in a few of the more common regulatory compliance scenarios.

Some tools and techniques for SharePoint development will be identified that can help to maximize your productivity when building records management solutions. More specifically, we'll look at ways to enhance the Visual Studio development environment by installing some popular utilities that are freely available on the Internet, taking advantage of some off-the-shelf tools that are included with the Visual Studio product, and building some additional tools of our own.

Understanding Current U.S. Regulations

Since records management is driven primarily by regulatory compliance, our solution development strategy depends on first understanding the relevant regulations so that we have a better idea of the roles and responsibilities facing organizations having to deal with records management. These regulations specify rules for handling ...