• New feature in SharePoint 2010 whereby the use of electronic discovery allows records managers to find and lock down content related to tracking external actions like litigation, investigation or audit

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  • For example, if a company is sued about how they use the word “eDiscovery”, the Records Manager needs to find and process all content that contains the words “eDiscovery” or “electronic discovery”
  • Allows discovery of documents by all metadata associated with the document and automatically places them “on hold” and/or copies the results to a specific location
  • In the US, “Federal Rules of Civil Procedure” governs the request of information in litigation,  so it is now easy to be able to produce electronic data when requested in a court
  • It is activated as a Site Feature:
    • Enable-SPFeature -id hold -url “<site url>”

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  • Processing holds is done by a timer job called “Hold Processing and Reporting” on the web application
    • Manually run this job to accelerate (it is run on a daily basis by default)
  • Holds can be set manually as well via the Compliance Details dialog invoked from the ECB menu

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  • Pad lock added to list item when on hold

 

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  • Holds are found using the search index and you have the ability to preview results as well as choose the site you would like to search for the relevant documents

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Records Management applications

  • Used in scenarios involving law suits and litigation
    • In the US, corporations have  Civil Rule requirements for providing records.
    • Failure to produce documents in legal cases results in stiff penalties.  
    • There is still a lot of confusion on how these rules are applied and it depends on what policies are in place and how much risk your exposed to. 
    • What it means is that you need to be able to find the records in a set period of time, place a hold on them and not allow them to be deleted. 
    • Audit makes sure you can check if they are edited or deleted.
  • In the process of electronic discovery, data of all types can serve as evidence.
    • This can include text, images, calendar files, databases, spreadsheets, audio files, animation, Web sites and computer programs.
  • Holds and eDiscovery features of SharePoint can be used to prevent spoliation of data and compliance with various laws (for example, holding financial records for 7 years or putting a hold on a document because of a litigation).
  • Important because you can now search & place holds across farms, whereas before you could have only  1 records center in a farm.  Not very useful.

The complete list of this series can be seen by the following links:

1. Introduction
2. Document IDs
3. Managed Metadata Service (Term Store)
4. In-Place Records Declarations
5. Site Collection Auditing
6. Content Organizer
7. Compliance Details
8. Hold and eDiscovery
9. Content Type Publishing Hubs
10. Multi-Level Retention
11. Virtual folders and metadata based navigation
12. Scaling
13. Send To…
14. Document Sets

References

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee557329%28office.14%29.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554902(office.14).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee557262(office.14).aspx

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