In order to learn how to archive in SharePoint you can understand it as an email archiving system used by companies for managing their ever-expanding volume of emails, similarly records can be archived in SharePoint. Companies can legally monitor the communications of their employees under various rules and regulations including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, SEC Rule 17a-4 and HIPAA.
Similarly SharePoint is being used by a number of organizations as a much better tool for employee collaboration via email as compared to any other trading accessory. But there can be various operational risks and other challenges in archiving intellectual property in SharePoint.
The rules applicable to retaining the communication records through email are also applicable on creating, managing and storing records in SharePoint. There are certain confusing things about archiving in SharePoint. Though there is no clear instruction about what can be stored and for how much time in the SharePoint but still it has limited space for storing such formless records. Moreover such records can also not be dumped down to remain untouched for long time by transferring them on some backup tapes as SharePoint records should be readily available in case of any regulatory investigation or lawsuit.
A company can use SharePoint as its IT manager to store various new records alongwith emails. Though SharePoint stores entirely new information about every new version created in it but it can also be used as an effective tool. For instance any change made by your colleague in of your Power Point slides will be stored in SharePoint as a completely new slide. In this way SharePoint quickly consumes the space to store records.
In this way a organization has to increase the number of SharePoint sites quickly as most of them are used to store short term projects. So such sites are normally temporary as they are used only till the project is completed.
Benefits of Archiving in SharePoint
Reduction in cost of storage: SharePoint reduces the cost of storing multiple copies of the same document by storing only one copy in the archive, if it is stored in email or the file system of the archive, which reduces the cost of storage.
Optimization of storage resources: Archiving records in SharePoint records enables IT department of a company to use its storage space for moving older records from expensive options to reasonably costing storage space.
Documents can be stored in compressed format: SharePoint allows storing the documents of going to be completed project in compressed form to further reduce the cost of storage.
Easy maintenance of records: Maintenance of records can be improved by moving the records from primary storage resource to secondary as the database or backups can be scanned now easily.
Save storage space: Any document is compressed to half of its size and metadata is added to it before archiving it. It also saves your efforts while sharing the document as it can be done by adding metadata only.
Thus the information provided here above help you to know how to archive in SharePoint.
