By: Rahul Mehta | Comments | Related: > SharePoint Document Management
Problem
Many enterprises have data which should be put under litigation hold. But we recently came across a requirement where an enterprise had a criteria or filtration parameter for content that was to be put under litigation hold. For instance, every document (of docx type) should be put under a hold in a region site in order to avoid critical data inconsistency.
Solution
SharePoint 2010 has a feature called "discover and hold content" under the "hold and ediscovery category" which facilitates the setting of documents under hold depending upon the search query provided. We have previously showed on how to activate the "Hold and eDiscovery" feature and how to create a hold rule in Holds List. For our current scenario, I have uploaded multiple documents in a SharePoint Document Library.
Go to Site Actions-> Site Settings-> Hold and eDsicovery-> Discover and hold content
Here, we need to provide three main pieces of information:
- Search Criteria: We need to mention appropriate site names where we want to search. We also need to provide a query which will find data from the target site. The query has unique syntax which can be found at the "Learn More..." link. For our purposes, I enter "filetype:docx" under "Enter one or more search items into the box below". "filetype:docx" would find all the files that have a docx extension in the target site.
- Local Hold or Export: We can select to keep hold documents locally or move it to some other location where the enterprise can store hold documents in a special area. In our case, I will leave it as is.
- Relevant Hold: This is the hold rule that we have created in the Holds List. Select an appropriate hold.
After performing all the stes above, click "Add results to hold".
But our work doesn't end here. When we add the results to the hold, a timer job is scheduled to perform the hold job. In our case, we need to run it manually as the hold job is a daily timer job which would execute at a specific time. We can configure the proposed time to execute. For now go to Central Administration->Monitoring->Check job status.
Click on "Schedule Jobs".
From the list of jobs, find the "Search and Process" timer jobs which have a relative application name on which we applied the hold. We need to ensure that the appropriate "Search and Process" timer job is selected; otherwise our hold will not be executed properly. Click on the "Search and Process" job.
We can see that the timer job details and the job timings are shown in the open window. For our purpose, just click on "Run Now".
After some time, go to document library and have a look at the icon of the docx extension documents. You will notice that a lock has been applied to the documents.
In such a way, organizations could implement hold to content depending upon specific parameters.
Next Steps
- Use the discover and hold feature to hold file of specific names, types and for more parameters.
- Use the discover and hold feature to hold file of combinational queries too.
- Check the previous article on How to maintain litigation hold on single document in SharePoint 2010
About the author
Rahul Mehta is a Project Architect/Lead working at Tata Consultancy Services focusing on ECM.This author pledges the content of this article is based on professional experience and not AI generated.
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