Records management helps users address evolving governance mandates to meet regulatory, legal, and fiduciary requirements. Proactive adherence to information retention policies and procedures is a critical facet of any compliance strategy. IBM® Enterprise Records helps organizations enforce centralized policy management for file plans, retention schedules, legal preservation holds, and auditing. IBM Enterprise Records enables your organization to securely capture, declare, classify, store, and dispose of electronic and physical records. In this IBM Redbooks® publication, we introduce the records management concept and provide an overview of IBM Enterprise Records. We address records management topics, including the retention schedule, file plan, records ingestion and declaration, records disposition, records hold, and Enterprise Records application programming interfaces (APIs). We also use a case study to describe step-by-step instructions to implement a sample records management solution using Enterprise Records. We provide concrete examples of how to perform tasks, such as file plan creation, records ingestion and declaration, records disposition, and records hold. This book helps you to understand the records management concept, the IBM Enterprise Records features and capabilities, and its use.

In a corporate environment, documents are usually created or captured in a decentralized environment with no overall surveillance. Many corporations have no formal process of retaining these documents as records, which can increase storage costs. In addition, when litigation requests occur, companies can spend a huge amount of money and resources to locate records. In the case when a company is not able to locate records or to locate them on a timely manner, the company is subjected to a financial penalty or, more importantly, damage to the company's reputation. IBM Records Manager is an application and an engine that provides records management capabilities to existing business applications. It provides a single and consistent records management platform to help companies meet government and industry requirements for formal records management. This IBM Redbooks publication provides an introduction to records management and IBM Records Manager. Solution architects, designers, and implementers who plan to implement IBM Records Manager will find this book useful. It also serves as a guide for system administrators or records administrators in performing common records management administration tasks in IBM Records Manager. Lastly, the first part of this book serves as a good starting point for anyone who is interested in exploring the world of records management.