SharePoint 2010 allows you to put documents inside your Record Center on hold; which will exempt those documents from retention policies and workflows. This is a handy feature in case you’re in the middle of an audit and want to pause standard lifecycle of selected documents.
When putting a document on hold – you can pick a type of hold which can be created using Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Holds list. By using a context menu, then, you select a hold type, and an optional comment related to the hold you’re applying to the document.
Now that the document is on hold – all of the policies apply, but how do you report of documents and types of hold that was applied to them.
First, let’s see how you can get to the basics …
To see the URLs of the items on a particular type of hold – you’d want to follow the steps below:
1. From the record center navigate to Site Actions -> Site Settings 2. Under Holds and eDiscovery click Hold Reports. You will see a document library with a list of excel files representing each type of hold. Those excel files are generated on a daily basis by default by a Hold timer job. You can run the time job on demand or decrease an interval of how often the time job runs. 3. Pick an excel file representing a particular type of hold. 4. Switch to Items on Hold sheet in the excel report and see the URLs of items that are on that particular type of hold.
Now, above report doesn’t give us the comments that users enter when the document is on hold.
As it turns out, when document is put on hold – SharePoint 2010 also records an audit event, so you can extract event data (such as type of hold and associated comments) by running an audit report. This is not so widely documented, so let’s see what’s involved.
1. From the records center, click Site Actions -> Site Settings. 2. Click Audit log Reports as shown below: 3. Click run a "Custom Report" 4. Provide the location (document library) to save this on demand report 5. From the list of events, pick Custom Events only 6. Pick any other filtering parameters such as a date range or a user name to zero down the report on. 7. Click OK, the report will render and you will be offered to download it. 8. Open an excel report and select the Report Data sheet in excel. 9. Filter the report to have Source = Hold 10. You will also see the type of hold and user comments in the EventData column. Thats`s where you get all of the comments and types of hold applied.
The second option is not widely described online so I often get asked whether this is even possible … it is, and now you know how.
Enjoy!
