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

Chapter 8. Information Policy and Record Retention

Since the Information Policy framework was developed precisely to deal with records management issues, you can learn a lot by studying the default implementations of the built-in policy features. In this chapter, we'll look at the Expiration Policy Feature, which uses a straightforward design pattern that addresses the competing goals of enabling administrators to define complex expiration policies while allowing developers to extend the policy feature with custom expiration formulas and actions. We'll also look beyond the core implementation to gain an understanding of the special Expiration Timer Job and its role in ensuring that the retention period for individual list items is calculated correctly and that any associated actions are performed in a timely manner. Finally, we'll look for ways to extend our evolving File Plan schema to include support for automatically applying an expiration policy to documents and list items.

The Expiration Policy Feature

In Chapter 7, we explored the Information Policy architecture and the structure of custom policy features and policy resources. In this chapter, let's take a deeper look at the built-in Expiration Policy Feature to gain a better understanding of how it works. I'm calling attention to this particular policy feature because it implements an interesting design pattern that we can apply to our own policy features and policy resources.

The Expiration Policy Feature is used to control ...