As with file system archiving, why you are implementing SharePoint archiving will determine the archiving policies that you implement. This may be to meet compliance regulations or to control disk space usage on the server, or both. If compliance is a requirement, then this will obviously take priority.

When you have decided which SharePoint servers are to be archived, you also need to work out which site collections to include as archiving targets and the archiving policy that you want applied to each one.

Auto-enabling site collections means that new sites created under the target top level site are automatically enabled for archiving and the policy for the site collection applied. This reduces the need for manual administration intervention but requires that your sites are well defined and organized. If, for example, on a SharePoint Server you create a site collection but decide that some of the subsites are not to be archived, you should not set auto-enable on and must manually create site collection objects for each new subsite created.

To enable users to search for archived items from SharePoint site pages, you will need to install the Archive Search Web part on each SharePoint server being archived. You can then place the Archive Search Web part on site pages, as required. Alternatively, users can access SharePoint archives using Archive Explorer Web part or in a browser. The access method you choose will depend on the experience that you want users to have. The Archive Search Web part behaves in a very similar way to the SharePoint Portal Server search, which users may already be familiar with. Archive Explorer may offer additional facilities, such as copy and move, but may require some end user training, depending on users' level of IT understanding.

If versioning is enabled, the version history link also needs to be added to allow users to see earlier versions of a document that have been archived.

If you are archiving drafts (from SharePoint 3.0 targets), and some users have access to approved documents but not drafts, then you need to consider carefully the SharePoint draft options that you select in the SharePoint archiving policy.