Fedintel provides an intuitive, robust environment for document collaboration and storage. However, many corporations have records management and regulatory compliance needs that necessitate maintaining separate servers that are used to manage official business records and other highly regulated material. This presents a challenge to records managers: How do you easily, and consistently, move documents from the collaborative SharePoint sites to the more strictly controlled environment of a record repository server? Fedintel provides the record repository Web service, designed to enable records managers to automate the process of moving documents into a record repository. Fedintel enables Office SharePoint Server 2007 to send documents and their associated metadata to a record repository, be that repository a SharePoint site or a third-party document storage application. The Web service is designed to be as generic as possible, so that third-party document storage providers can implement it with minimum effort. The Web service relies on no SharePoint-specific concepts or functionality. The service lets you pass both the document and any metadata about the document you want to retain, including an audit history of the events performed on the document.
This capability gives records managers a simple yet powerful way to integrate the advantages of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 collaborative work environment with their existing records storage system. Also, because the record repository Web service is heavily abstracted, moving from one document storage application to another requires much less effort than an approach that requires more knowledge of the inner structure and workings of the record repository.
Sending Files to a Record Repository
When you send a file to the record repository, either manually or through the object model, you are sending a copy of that file. The original file is not altered in any way and contains no link to its copy in the record repository. However, the copy is submitted to the repository with a pointer to the location of the original file. When submitting a file, Office SharePoint Server 2007 packages the content type metadata for that file, along with the file's audit history, as XML. Office SharePoint Server 2007 passes the file's content type name as its record routing type. Because a given record routing type can have multiple aliases, multiple content types can be mapped to the same record routing type.