Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Moving a Records Center: Bad Idea

Moving a SharePoint 2010 records center will cause several issues of varying significance.

Document Management Implications:

  • If you have a custom Send To location allowing users to submit documents to the record center, this URL will need to be updated
    • A simple change
  • If your Send To location leaves a reference to the file in the original location, this will be broken:image
    • When clicking on the file reference you will see an error message “File not found”
    • This is irreversible

Records Center Implications:

  • All content organizer rules will have incorrect URL’s to the destination library, so these all need to be updated
    • A time consuming change if you have a lot of rules
  • Any document library/records library with retention schedules will be irreversibly broken in that you can no longer manage the schedule.  All libraries will need to be re-created, content migrated, and retention schedules added
    • The symptoms of this are detailed below in section “Broken Records Library Symptoms”
    • I have found no way to get around this other than recreating all libraries!!!
    • A very time consuming change if you have a lot of libraries, content, or complex retention schedules
    • Note: to delete record libraries you need to remove all records, then run the "Hold Processing and Reporting" timer job in Central Administration.  When this is complete, you can delete the records library.  Thanks to Michal Pisarek on MSDN for this one.

Broken Records Library Symptoms

When trying to manage the retention settings on the records library I see the error:

1. Click on Change source or configure library schedule:

manage the retention schedule

2. An error occurs:

error

3. And in the logs (nothing very helpful):

Exception Thrown: StartIndex cannot be less than zero.

Parameter name: startIndex Inner Exception: StartIndex cannot be less than zero.

Parameter name: startIndex

Recommendation

If you are using a single records center for managing retention, putting the records center in it’s own site collection is a good idea.  This also adds isolates the content from a security perspective.  You can always manually add links to the record center where necessary for people that need to access it from the main application.

Plan the Information Architecture up front – this one needs a good home from that start.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Delete document library option missing on settings page

You can’t delete a document library if it contains records.  This is a sensible feature considering that documents declared as records would logically have some retention requirement…

To delete:

  1. Undeclare your records or move them to another location
    1. If you’re working with a large document library with many folders etc. you could create a “Records View”, by filtering out any documents where the “Declared Record” field is not blank:
    2. image
    3. When all are deleted/moved, the delete option appears again in the settings page
  2. Delete the document library