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

Chapter 3. SharePoint Tools for Managing Records

This chapter introduces the key components for building records management solutions on the SharePoint platform. We'll look at the tools and components that are built into Windows SharePoint Services for building collaborative applications, and we'll also look at the extended functionality provided by MOSS.

It is important to remember that MOSS is essentially a Windows SharePoint Services application. There are additional assemblies that are deployed with MOSS to provide the code behind the MOSS-specific features, but you can really think of MOSS as just a collection of SharePoint features. Thus, when we consider the tools and components needed to build records management solutions, we are really looking at both the WSS fundamentals as well as the extended functionality provided by MOSS.

The core WSS components we examine will include document libraries, which are a specialization of the SharePoint list that provides the ability to store documents and their metadata. It will include content types, which are essential for ECM development and make it much easier to build records management solutions because they provide much of the core functionality needed to associate different kinds of records with the unique processing required to manage them. In this chapter, we'll explore different approaches to creating content types.

Another area we'll explore is the versioning mechanism that is built into WSS. Although versioning is not seen as ...