Alfresco Records Management – An Example of Automatic Record Filing

In this post we will continue the discussion of in-place record declaration by automatically filing a record using Alfresco RM. This post illustrates how an HR document can be automatically filed in the File Plan using Alfresco Rules.

Once the user declares a document as a record, the document will be automatically linked to the Records Management Share site’s Unfiled Records folder. Once it is linked to the folder, the rules for auto-filing will evaluate the document. In general, the processing of the record could be partially or fully automated depending on the Records Manager’s requirements.

To start the example, when a record is declared in-place it is linked to the Unfiled records folder in the Records Management site. To illustrate, this video from Alfresco depicts the manual filing of an unfiled record.

One of the more common examples of auto-filing rules are rules that inspect the values of a document’s properties and link the document to one or more file plan folders. If the filing rules are complex, they can be simplified by applying rules in a hierarchy using layers of sub-folders within the Unfiled Records folder. The rules are configured by the Records Manager or someone with RM access to the Records Management Share site.

For example, if a Marketing Image is declared in-place, it will first be linked to the Unfiled Records folder and processed. The rule on the Unfiled Records folder will evaluate a Department property as Marketing and a Document Type property as Image and move the record from the Unfiled Records folder to SubFolder 1. SubFolder 1 applies additional filing rules specific to marking images.

As described in this post, the processing of a record may result in it satisfying multiple rules and being linked to multiple folders in the file plan. For example, an Employee Contract may need to be filed in both an Employee’s folder in the HR series of records and in the Contracts folder in the Legal series. Regardless of how many folders a record may be linked to, the Disposition rules from each folder are applied and the Disposition schedule with the longest duration will always be honored by the disposition process.

After the record is processed, the user can view disposition information about the record from the Human Resources Share site where the record was declared in-place.