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

Introduction

Despite its power and flexibility, SharePoint presents many challenges for building enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. This is partly because of the inherently complex nature of application development on the SharePoint platform in general, but mainly because the out-of-the-box tools that SharePoint provides (such as content types, site columns, lists, etc.) are defined at such a low level that it is often difficult for developers to find the right balance between building reusable components that capture the semantics they need when crafting their solutions and writing applications directly using CAML and .NET code. These challenges are even greater for records management (RM) development because the platform provides no built-in support for file planning or content life-cycle management.

Records management on the SharePoint platform relies on several different components that together provide a comprehensive set of tools for building RM solutions, but each of these components can also be understood as a separate and distinct technology. As an example, Information Policy plays an important role in records management but also stands alone as a powerful component of any ECM solution.

This book, therefore, has two goals. The first is to explain the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) records management architecture and to share the most effective design methodologies and development strategies I've found for building ECM/RM solutions on the SharePoint ...