Information management policies enable you to control who can access your organizational information, what they can do with it, and how long to retain it. A policy can help enforce compliance with legal and governmental regulations or internal business processes. As an administrator, you can set up a policy to control how to track documents, who has access to documents, and how long to retain documents.

Each policy establishes a set of rules for a type of content. Each rule in a policy is a policy feature. For example, an information management policy feature could specify how long a type of content should be retained. Policies can be implemented in several ways:

• By creating a policy template and then associating the template with a site collection, a content type, document library, or list
• By associating individual policy features with a content type, library, or list

1. On the site collection home page, click Site actions, point to Site Settings, and then click Modify All Site Settings.
2. On the Site Settings page, in the Site Collection Administration list, click Site collection policies.
3. On the Site Collection Policies page, click Create.
4. Type a name and description for the policy, and then write a brief policy statement that explains to users what the policy is for. A policy statement can be up to 512 characters.
5. Use the information in the topic Configure features of an information management policy to set up the features you want to associate with the policy.
6. Click OK to return to the Site Collection Policies page.

After you create a policy, you can optionally associate it with a site collection and ensure that only that policy is used throughout the site.

1. On the Site Collection Policies page, click Settings.
2. On the Site Collection Policy Settings page, select Use a site collection policy, and then select the policy to apply to the site collection.
3. Use the Allow custom policies option to determine whether users can add additional policies to the site collection.
   • To ensure that only the specified policy is used on all lists and libraries throughout the site, select No.
   • To allow users to have custom policies, keep the default setting, Yes. The selected policy will still be the default for all content in the site collection.