In FY22, Enterprise Technology & Services (ET&S) completed a two-year project for the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Admissions and Registrar offices to evaluate and clean up unneeded documents and leveraged the document retention policies for both offices in the process. This project reduced security risks, reestablishes critical document retention policies, and freed up server space.
ApplicationXtender (aka Xtender) is an instant document management solution that minimizes the costs and risks of paper while increasing productivity by streamlining the capture and management of documents (source: NDM.net). UNH Admissions began using Xtender to store its admissions documents electronically in 2008; the Registrar’s Office began shortly after. Prior to the use of Xtender, both offices kept paper versions of their documents, and each had a document retention policy that dictated how long the documents should be retained after a student applied or left UNH. Although UNH implemented Xtender, it did not have an effective method to implement its document retention policies electronically.
Ellucian eventually created Banner Document Retention to address this issue, and ET&S leverages this product to clean up the Admissions and Registrar documents in Xtender.
ET&S completed each project over the course of several months and worked with each office to identify the retention policy associated with each type of document, and the Banner data which could be used to do the evaluation. From there, ET&S developed the code capable of selecting the appropriate records for disposition, and once tested, was completed the evaluation in the production environment, and then delete unneeded documents
In FY21, ET&S deleted 828,999 undergrad admissions documents for Admissions. In FY22, ET&S deleted 619,679 documents for the Registrar. Removing these documents reduces costs for ongoing storage and improves the USNH security footprint by not holding on to potentially sensitive information without a specific need.
ET&S will now run the process to evaluate and delete documents once a year.
