Importance

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Abstract

A method of managing the retention and deletion of electronic documents in which the respective document retention needs of the document owners and the document retention criteria of the enterprise that functions as the central administration of the system are achieved without compromise by establishing a dual label for each document that is to be stored in the system and allowing a different expiration date to be entered into the system for each label. The first label is referred to as the Document Label (DL) and functions to identify the business use classification of the document. The second label is referred to as the Ownership Label (OL) and functions to identify a document classification assigned by the owner, which in most situations is the author. The separate expiration dates associated with each of the labels are referred to as the Ownership expiration date and the Document expiration date. The ownership expiration date is set by the owner to indicate the length of time that he desires ownership of the document. Ownership implies the authority and responsibility for the document during the ownership period. A System Administrator (SA) for example establishes the document expiration date. Each document filed in the system has associated with it the label and expiration date criteria that are employed to automatically manage the retention and deletion of the electronic documents stored by the system in accordance with some simple algorithm that allows a document to be deleted only when a particular relationship exists among a current date and the two expiration dates.

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First Claim