| Oracle® Records Management Administrator's Guide 10g (10.1.1) Part Number B16225-01 |
|
| View PDF |
| Oracle® Records Management Administrator's Guide 10g (10.1.1) Part Number B16225-01 |
|
| View PDF |
Administrator's Guide
10g (10.1.1)
B16225-01
July 2005
This document provides conceptual information for Oracle Records Management 10g (10.1.1) Administration. This chapter contains the following topics:
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Most organizations have found that the importance and volume of business-critical records is rapidly increasing. Because of this, many companies are reevaluating their unstructured data strategy and are turning towards a centralized records management policy.
Records management is the systematic and comprehensive control of the creation, capture, maintenance, filing, use, and disposition of records. It aims to ensure that records:
are authentic and reliable
can be retrieved when needed as quickly and efficiently as possible
are not destroyed prematurely or kept longer than required
To address the regulatory, legal, and best practices requirements for managing electronic records, records management systems must support the ability to:
Declare records
Restrict access to records
Dispose of records
Manage Policy
Oracle Records Management is a records management application that ships with Oracle Content Services.
One of the challenges of implementing a records management policy is the difficulty users have in declaring records. Oracle Records Management makes record declaration and policy management easier by enabling records management properties on a destination (folder) which can be transparent to the user.
Oracle Records Management captures and recordizes content in three different ways:
Explicitly declaring that a piece of content is a record. The user browses the file plan and picks a record category to apply to the content, and the content is recordized and managed under that record category's policy.
Enforcing a record category or a record folder on an Oracle Content Services folder. Depending on what is enforced, all documents uploaded into that folder will automatically be recordized using that record category or record folder. This is called recordizing content by placement (as in the folder).
In addition, Oracle Records Management enables universal access to a single records policy and repository through Web Services, making it available in collaborative environments, portals, and business applications.
Using Oracle Records Management 10g, organizations can:
Declare records: Enable records to be declared manually, automatically, or programmatically through Web Services. Once a record has been declared, the records management engine takes disposition control of the document.
Dispose of records: Allow life cycle management and final disposition control of the records. Administrators can configure Oracle Content Services 10g to conform to a corporate records retention policy by automatically retaining or disposing of recordized content.
Manage Policy: File plans control the operational restrictions on records and enables file plan hierarchy creation and management (including cutoff, retention periods, disposition actions, record freezes, and record searches).
Leverage Industry standards-based Web Services and BPEL support for integration with any legacy or electronic Business Application.
When Oracle Content Services is installed, Oracle Records Management is installed automatically, but the application is disabled by default. Oracle Records Management can be enabled through the Application Server Control for Collaboration Suite. Records management-related metrics can also be configured through the Application Server Control for Collaboration Suite.
Developing an effective records management program requires a combination of policies, procedures, training, and practices. An effective electronic records management program should be supported with an appropriate organizational structure and records management skill set. When planning for an enterprise-wide electronic records management deployment, organizations should ensure that the different aspects of a successful deployment are covered:
Define and establish records management policies, procedures and retention schedules.
Map out the interdependencies between the business functions that create, receive, manage, and store records, as well as the requirements from the legal, IT, records management, and compliance functions.
Develop the business structure, practices, and functional requirements for your enterprise-wide electronic records management program.
Deploy the records management technology in a pilot phase to a smaller group of users to test the records management process. Minimize the end-user impact from declaring records by focusing on near-automated ways of declaring content as records through placement or programmatically using Web Services APIs.
Deploy the integrated electronic records management process in production for the entire organization.
By carefully investing in the records management process prior to implementing the records management technology, organizations can help ensure successful adoption.
In order to place content under records management control, the content must be declared and classified according to the lifecycle management rules in the file plan. The record taxonomy in a file plan should be carefully created to reflect the appropriate taxonomy for an organization.
There are many different ways to organize a file plan. For example, an organization may decide to create a file plan organized by business function or by business activity.
Although it is important to note that the creation of a file plan hierarchy that support the activities of an organization is unique in every instance.
Records Administrators can create one or more file plans to organize the records in a system. The Records Administrator can perform the following for each file plan:
Provide a name and description
Define the record category and rules in the file plan
Records Administrators can specify a set of policies that control the behavior of the records the file plan controls in the Oracle Content Services application.
A file plan can contain multiple record series. A record series enables further grouping of record categories. The Records Administrator must provide a name and description for each record series.
The Records Administrator can create record categories under a file plan or under a record series. For each record category, the Records Administrator can specify the following:
A name and description.
Whether cutoff occurs at regular intervals.
An ordered list of disposition instructions that are executed upon cutoff. A disposition action is executed after cutoff occurs.
For example, the disposition instructions for a record category could be to retain all records managed by the record category for one month after cutoff, then move it to a special folder and retain it the records for a year.
The set of available disposition actions are move, delete and retain. For disposition actions that require a destination, a folder destination must be specified.
The Records Administrator can also specify additional attributes for records filed within the record category. The attributes must have one of the following types:
Boolean
Date
Enumerated String
Enumerated Integer
Integer
String
For each of the extended record attributes, the Records Administrator can specify defaults, allowed values, and whether users must specify values for these attributes for recorded documents.
Records Administrators can optionally create record folders to further organize records within a record category. A record folder inherits the attributes specified by its parent record category.
The Records Administrator must provide a name and description for each record folder and decide if the cutoff on the folder overrides that on the parent record category.
Records folders are used to organize the records within a record category into time-based segments with a different cutoff than the record category.
For example, a record category for a business process documentation may have specific record folders within it for the records from the 2005 fiscal year that have a different cutoff period than determined for the record category.
Retention periods determine the length of time that a record must be kept, unless there is a legal or regulatory action requiring that certain records be held or frozen from possible destruction.
Oracle Records Management supports legal holds, which allows the Records Administrator to suspend the lifecycles of all records in a record category or folder indefinitely by using the freeze/unfreeze command.
There are three ways to declare content within the Oracle Records Management application:
User-initiated: users can use the make record function
By placement: administrators can enforce a record category on a specific folder
Programmatically: leveraging the Web Services and Workflow support records can be declared automatically as part of a business flow
Organizations can implement different ways of declaring records based on specific record attributes, by using the customized workflow capability in Oracle Content Services.
Record Administrators may want to keep the necessary user input (prompted record attributes) to a minimum when creating record categories, to reduce the end-user workflow disruption. Hidden record attributes and non-prompted default values enable capturing categories without forcing user input.
Accessing records is managed in Oracle Content Services. Users can only search on records that they have access to. Record Administrators can view all records in the system and can unrecordize content that may have been inadvertently recordized by a user.
Oracle Content Services provides hardware retention capabilities through storage technologies, such as Network Appliance SnapLock and EMC Centera.
You can use the Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Application Server Control for Collaboration Suite to integrate Oracle Content Services with Network Appliance SnapLock and EMC Centera.
To integrate Oracle Content Services with a records management retention device, you must first install the hardware (either EMC Centera or Network Appliance SnapLock). Then, you must specify credential information for the hardware and set retention-related domain properties using the Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Application Server Control for Collaboration Suite.
Once you have created a record category and defined retention policies in Oracle Records Management, Oracle Content Services designates appropriate content as records to be stored in a records management retention device.
See Also:
Oracle Content Services Administrator's Guide for more informationclose/open
The ability to stop records from being filed under a specific record category. Even if a record category is closed, disposition still continues.
cutoff
When a record is marked to begin its disposition or retention cycle.
disposition
The set of rules which specify what to do with records as part of their lifecycle. This may include retaining, moving, or deleting records.
file plan
A collection of record categories and record series containing the disposition/handling instructions for records belonging to the record category.
freeze/unfreeze
The ability to stop the final disposition instruction (delete) in the lifecycle of a record from being executed. All other dispositin instructions (retain and move) are executed.
hardware immutability
The ability of the hardware to prevent anyone from accessing, altering or deleting any content stored on the disk.
lifecycle
The life span of a record from its creation or receipt to its final disposition. It is usually described in three stages: creation, maintenance and use, and final disposition.
record
Any form of recorded information that is under records management control.
record category
A description of a particular set of records within a file plan. Each record category contains retention and disposition data associated with it, which apply to all record folders and records within the record category.
record folder
A structure used to manage and organize records into time periods supporting retention and disposition.
record series
A named Container for a set of record categories.
retention period
The set of rules which specify how long to keep records.
Oracle Records Management Administrator's Guide, 10g (10.1.1)
B16225-01
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