SharePoint document management – the end of the journey
In this blog post, I will continue the discussion on document management in SharePoint. The previous posts covered document metadata and document sets, and reviewing and sharing documents. As I stated in the first post, all documents go through a journey, and this post covers the end of that journey: archiving and deletion of documents.
Archiving and deletion are important aspects of document management, as they help the relevant and valuable information to stand out and to be found, while reducing the clutter and storage costs. Also, in the future, you don’t want your Copilot to form its answers based on expired data ☝🏼
Archiving of documents
Archiving documents in SharePoint means moving them from an active site to a less active or inactive site, where they can still be read, but not modified or deleted. Archiving can be done manually or automatically, depending on the organisation’s needs and preferences.
When I’m writing this post, Microsoft has announced the Microsoft 365 Archiving feature a couple of months ago. In the Q4/2023, it the M365 Archive will be in Public preview, and then we will know more about the pricing and the features. With the new feature, you can choose to archive a whole SharePoint site, and in the later phase (H2/2024), individual files too.
Until that, archiving of documents in SharePoint needs to be done either manually or, for example, with the help of Power Automate. The manual way of archiving is basically selecting the file/s on the library, choosing Move from the ribbon and selecting the location where to move them. The trickiest part in this one is to actually get the destination site visible on the list 🙄
Ootb, it’s very easy to move files to an archive, but requires manual work.
With Power Automate, one of the simplest solutions is to give the document metadata, such as Status (e.g. Active, To be verified, To be archived) or, more straightforwardly, Expiry date. I’ve never been a huge fan of Expiry dates of documents, since you might not be quite sure beforehand when the document is actually going to be expired. If you do, good for you. If you don’t, the automation gets rid of the document before you even notice, and you end up rummaging through trash.
Anway, with the metadata defined, you can have a daily flow running in the background checking your document library, whether there are documents with the Status To be archived. If found, those documents will be then moved to the archive location. This is a very simple automation and doesn’t scale very well for huge amounts of documents, libraries or sites. In addition, it requires the users to actually go and change the status of a document, so it kind of relies on functioning content governance model too.
Making things automated - Retention labels and policies
Another way to archive documents in SharePoint is to use retention labels and policies. Retention labels are metadata tags that you can apply to documents or folders, to specify how long they should be retained, and what should happen to them after the retention period expires. Retention policies are rules that you can create and apply to sites, libraries, or folders, to automatically apply retention labels to the content. You can use retention labels and policies to archive documents by setting the retention action to "Move to another location". This will move the documents to a predefined archive site.
Why to archive when you can just delete them?
Well, there are numerous reasons why you cannot simply delete the files, usually defined by the law or some regulations. But, in the end, most of the documents will be, or at least should be deleted, and since usually the users are quite lazy to do that, there are ways to automate the deletion as well.
For example, you can use the above-mentioned retention labels and policies also to delete documents by setting the retention action to "Delete". This will permanently delete the documents after the retention period expires. Again, you need to be able to define what is the retention period, i.e. how long something will be preserved within your tenant before deletion.
Automation versus governance?
Even though technically almost anything can be done regarding automating the archiving or deletion of documents, it’s even more important to define the governance model for the documents. It should answer to the basic questions like who archives/deletes the documents, when and how. And I can almost guarantee that without an owner, nothing will happen to a document and it will be forgotten to the depths of SharePoint. So make sure all your documents have an owner tagged to them and that the owner knows what they are supposed to do with the documents after they are not actively used anymore. This will have more effect on your data quality than any kind of automation ever will.
I hope you have enjoyed reading these posts, or at least they have given you more information on why SharePoint is a proper document management system. These posts don’t cover it all – SharePoint has hundreds of other features that are related to document management and learning about them has been a journey it’s own. I’m still on that journey and Microsoft is making sure that the journey will expand still for years to come. The upcoming months and years will be more interesting than ever, when the M365 Copilot steps in. Stay with me on the journey, and I’ll share my findings with you.