Information management (IM) policies can be set in a number of places in SharePoint 2010. The question is: When you have conflicting policies, which policy wins out?
To test this I created conflicting IM policies in a few different places that could affect one document. I decided to use the Labels policy which allows you to add a label to any document when it is printed. First, I created a policy for the ‘Document’ content type in a document library I created. Next, I created a content type that inherits from the Document content type with another IM policy. I’m interested to see if the IM policy I set on the ‘Document’ content type will be picked up by the new inheriting content type so I also created a document content type which inherits from ‘Document’, but does not have an IM policy.
You can create IM policies by accessing the ‘Information management policy settings’ in the settings for that content type (the same goes for document libraries). Here’s a quick look at the options you have when adding labels:
After creating new documents and testing out it seems that policies do not affect inheriting content types, so policies were not conflicting in this case.
After testing out different scenarios with the original policies I created trying to force a confliction, it just didn’t seem to be working. To force a confliction I decided to set a policy on the ‘Document’ content type at the site collection level that conflicts with the one that I created on a document library. This was the result:
At first glance it looks as if the policy I set at the site collection level is overriding the policy i set for the specific document library, but after going back to verify the document library’s IM policy I ran into this:
It seems that conflicting policies at different levels are not allowed, SharePoint will always default to the ‘parent policy’. As you can see I can’t even create separate non-conflicting policies for a single content type such as an expiration policy and a labels policy it always defaults to the parent.
To test this I created conflicting IM policies in a few different places that could affect one document. I decided to use the Labels policy which allows you to add a label to any document when it is printed. First, I created a policy for the ‘Document’ content type in a document library I created. Next, I created a content type that inherits from the Document content type with another IM policy. I’m interested to see if the IM policy I set on the ‘Document’ content type will be picked up by the new inheriting content type so I also created a document content type which inherits from ‘Document’, but does not have an IM policy.
You can create IM policies by accessing the ‘Information management policy settings’ in the settings for that content type (the same goes for document libraries). Here’s a quick look at the options you have when adding labels:
After creating new documents and testing out it seems that policies do not affect inheriting content types, so policies were not conflicting in this case.
After testing out different scenarios with the original policies I created trying to force a confliction, it just didn’t seem to be working. To force a confliction I decided to set a policy on the ‘Document’ content type at the site collection level that conflicts with the one that I created on a document library. This was the result:
At first glance it looks as if the policy I set at the site collection level is overriding the policy i set for the specific document library, but after going back to verify the document library’s IM policy I ran into this:
It seems that conflicting policies at different levels are not allowed, SharePoint will always default to the ‘parent policy’. As you can see I can’t even create separate non-conflicting policies for a single content type such as an expiration policy and a labels policy it always defaults to the parent.
