Todd said: "One of our departments has keyed document properties (Title, 
Subject, Keywords, etc) into newly created Microsoft Office 07 documents 
(Word and Excel) They have even created a custom document property 
of “retention” and want to go back and do this to all their legacy documents."

I would offer that this is an unwise plan.  Is there any advantage to having 
the metadata entered in the Word/Excel properties right now?  Unless you 
currently have a tool that can view the whole repository and select 
documents based on a particular document field, it's work that has no 
immediate benefit.  If you're planning to move to an ERMS in the next 12-18 
months, I would wait until then, and then add the metadata to the ERMS 
directly.  There are no longer any metadata migration issues and it can be 
used for immediate benefit.  It would probably be significantly less overall 
effort as well - in an ERMS you can apply some metadata to a large number of 
documents at once, rather than one at a time.

Off Topic:
IMHO hard-coding retention dates or retention lengths to documents is a 
second-best practice.  The best method is to store its retention schedule 
code.  (Retention is then determined by comparing the code to the retention 
schedule.)  It is standard RIM practice to review retention schedules every 24 
months or less and sometimes, due to changes in legal or audit requirements, 
a retention period might change.  For example, let's say that category XX01 
must be retained for 10 years now rather than 7 due to new legislation.  If all 
XX01 records have "7 years" as metadata, they all have to be found and 
updated, a potentially big job.  If only the retention code is stored, no 
changes to record metadata are necessary.

Wayne Hoff, CRM
Calgary, AB

List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance
To unsubscribe from this list, click the below link. If not already present, place UNSUBSCRIBE RECMGMT-L or UNSUB RECMGMT-L in the body of the message.
mailto:[log in to unmask]