If you’re like me, you have a bookcase somewhere in your office where you keep books and documents that you want easy access to because you might want to reference that information at some later date. My bookcase has a shelf where I keep things such as training manuals, design specifications for past projects, industry publications, as well as books by my favorite authors. Unfortunately, after several years of collecting these sorts of materials, I find that the information I’m keeping is pretty outdated. I have to start asking myself if I really need to keep that book about SharePoint 2003 or if that MSDN Magazine from 2006 is really going to be helpful anymore. There comes a point in time where I have to clean out the old so I have room for the new. If I don’t do some house cleaning, I’ll have so much outdated material on my shelf that I’ll no longer easily be able reach for my more recent documents or books without having to sift through a decade or more of old papers.
The same logic holds true for document retention in an electronic document repository like SharePoint. Old documents stored in a SharePoint environment take up server space just as my documents take up my shelf space.
Read the rest of this article, “Applying Document Retention in SharePoint 2010” on the official MVP blog.