With proper configuration, when you or your users declare a SharePoint document a record the process can be as simple as right-clicking the document and selecting ‘Send to…Records Center’. To make this process work, SharePoint needs to be configured to point to your Records Center.
As a Records Manager, it is unlikely that you will be configuring the connection between your SharePoint Document Libraries and the Records Center. This is probably something that would be managed by your IT department. (At the minimum, you must be a member of the Farm Administrators SharePoint group to even have permission to complete this procedure.) However, since you will ‘own’ the SharePoint records management process, it’s important that you understand how it’s done.
The first step is to navigate to SharePoint Central Administration. Do this by clicking on ‘Start’ and selecting ‘Administrative Tools’.
Under Central Administration, click on ‘Application Management’.
Under External Service Connections, click on ‘Records center’.
This will bring you to the ‘Configure Connection to Records Center’ page.
Select ‘Connect to a Records Center’. Next, enter the URL to your Records Center site. (If you and your developers haven’t done anything too funky, you should be able to go to your Records Center site homepage, copy the URL from the IE bar and append “/_vti_bin/officialfile.asmx” to it. It should look something – but not exactly – like this: “http://mysharepoint/reccen/_vti_bin/officialfile.asmx”.)
The value in ‘Display Name’ will appear as the ‘Send to…’ option. Enter something that makes it clear to your users that they are sending the document to your organization’s records repository. The format ‘ABC Corporate Records Center’ works better than simply ‘Records Center’.
Click on ‘OK’ and you should now be able to declare a record by using the ‘Send to…Records Center’ option.
If your declaration process was successful, you will get the following confirmation.
I should note that this process assumes you configured the Records Routing process properly. If you get the confirmation above, but can’t find the new record in its intended Records Center Library, check the ‘Unclassified Records’ Library. You probably didn’t configure the routing process correctly. Review Records Routing here.
If you get an error message after attempting to declare the record, there’s probably something wrong with the URL entered on the ‘Configure Connection to Records Center’ page.
