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

Chapter 13. Maintaining Record Integrity

In Chapter 1, we identified information integrity as a core records management requirement because any degradation in record integrity can affect many business processes and can also lead to legal liability. Often, companies must not only enforce a Records Management Policy that ensures records are not tampered with, but they must also prove that no tampering could have occurred. In this chapter, we will expand the notion of record integrity to include more than just creating tamper-proof records. We would also like to ensure that incoming records have valid metadata, which requires having the appropriate range of values in specific columns that are suitable for a given purpose. In this way we can ensure that a particular piece of content can be used to drive other business processes.

Building a Content Validation Framework

We would like to de-couple content validation from the core custom routing mechanism. Content validation is such a key requirement, it will often be necessary to incorporate some form of content validation logic into many different routing solutions. One way to do that is to build a separate validation framework that we can call from anywhere.

Although we are building the validation framework in the context of records management, it is important to note that this framework is suitable for inclusion in any SharePoint solution where you want to disallow certain content based on a precise set of validation rules.

In this section, ...