There are four types of Information Managment Policies available within a MOSS environment, and they are Labels, Auditing, Expiration, and Barcodes.  Each of these policies can be managed at different levels.

 

The first level at which these policies can be implemented is at the root of a site collection.  You'll have to be a site collection administrator to access these settings within the Site Settings.

The Site collection audit settings will define how items across the entire site collection should be audited, altough auditing can also be done at the list/library level.  Any auditing that is enabled will be stored in one audit log on the server.  Reports can then be run by administrators to show audit trails.

 

The Site collection policies setting will let you define policies that include labels, auditing, expiration, and barcodes.  These policies that you define can then be implemented at the indivdual list/library level.  So lets take a more in depth look at these 4 types of policies.

 

Labels - Labels allow us to capture important information for use when printing a document.  Labels are made up of a mixture of plain text and list/library columns in the format of {Title} or {Start Date}.  Unfortunately there are a handful of fields that cannot be a part of labels.  If you are familiar with SharePoint Designer you know that there are many built-in fields for each list that are never even surfaced within the browser, some of which include ScopeID and ProgID.

 

Auditing - Defining an audting policy will not automatically audit anything like the Site Collection Audit Settings will, instead this will provide us with a policy that we can then implement on a list/library.  So once you define a policy within the Site Collection Policies, navigate to a list/library and into the list/library settings.  Then click on Information Management Policy Settings.  You then have the ability to select a content type so that each content type on your list/library can have different policy settings.

After selecting a content type you have 3 options; the first is none to not use any policy.  The second allows you to define a policy at the particular list/library level.  And the 3rd allows you to choose from any policies that were defined within the Site Collection Polcies Settings.

 

Sorry for getting a bit off topic, lets get back to the other 2 types of policies.

 

Expiration - This one is pretty self explanitory and is a great way to mangae out of date content.  Here is a real world scenario where this could be very useful.  Lets say we set the expiration date to 6 months after a document was last modified.  Rather than using the standard delete action specified within the policy settings, what would be more useful would be to start a workflow that e-mails the user that created the document as well as the user who last modified it and ask them to either update the content or delete the item all togher