Custom Policy Features Scenarios

As powerful as the information management policy features that come with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 are, they hardly cover every content management scenario. Because of this, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 also provides an extensibility framework that enables you to create a wide range of policies to suit your business processes.

The following scenarios give you examples of how you can extend the policy features.

Control Document Printer Destinations

Your company is concerned with controlling the dissemination of sensitive data through the circulation of printed copies. Therefore, you want to limit the printing of certain documents to a specific set of highly secure, access-controlled printers. You can achieve this goal through use of a policy feature.

You can create a policy feature that contains the list of "trusted" printers. Assign a policy with this feature to the appropriate content types. Then deploy a 2007 Microsoft Office system add-in on all of your company's client computers. This add-in listens on the Print event in 2007 Microsoft Office system applications, and then checks whether the user is printing to one of the "trusted" printers. If not, then the add-in on the user's computer cancels the print job and informs the user.

Create Fixed-format Rendition

Your corporation is concerned with long-term record preservation; specifically, ensuring that your electronic files are in a format that can be read 15 to 20 years from today.

In this case, you can create a policy feature that generates a fixed-format copy of the content, and assign it to the content types you want to preserve. Then, for each document of that content type, the policy feature creates a fixed format rendering of the document, and stores that rendering as an attachment on the document in a SharePoint document library. The policy is enforced automatically for all items subject to the policy, with no intervention required from records managers or IT.

See Also

Concepts

Introduction to Information Management Policy
Policy Features Included in Office SharePoint Server 2007
Policy Feature Overview