Space management concepts
Content Manager has a concept of a Home Location for a record. This is the Location a record is stored in when it is not in use.
By extending the Home Location concept to include space, Content Manager can manage records in long-term storage facilities.
Instead of having an Organisation Location as a Home Location, a record in storage can have a space as a Home.
This Location represents the physical shelf in the storage facility where the record sits.
This also enabless the record to remain in the space storage system until the record's Retention Schedule dictates its archival sentencing.
Storage facilities are by their nature hierarchical. Conceptually, a storage facility can be viewed as one or more buildings. A building can have one or more floors. A floor can have one or more areas and so on.
In one sense, all storage can be viewed simply as a large collection of places on shelves to put record or archive boxes. By ordering this collection of spaces based upon which building/floor/area/row/etc. they are in, can make the space easy to comprehend.
A typical setup would be something like:
| Total Space = | ||||||||
| A number of storage facilities with | ||||||||
| A number of buildings per facility with | ||||||||
| A number of floors per building with | ||||||||
| A number of areas per floor with | ||||||||
| A number of rows per area with | ||||||||
| A number of bays per row with | ||||||||
| A number of shelves per bay with | ||||||||
| A capacity per shelf. | ||||||||
The capacity of a shelf is to be measured (at least initially) in terms of the number of standard archive boxes it can contain. If the user wishes to use the above structure, but have a specific spot on a shelf for an archive box, then there would be an additional level of a number of slots per shelf, and the archive box would be assigned to the slot level.
Not all organisations use the same structure for the arrangement of their storage hierarchy.
Content Manager therefore enables you to design your space according to your needs.
You can define up to a maximum of ten levels for your storage space. Individual Locations within the space hierarchy can be given names that are meaningful to your site, for example, Warehouse 29, or Bay 13 etc.
Keep it simple.
While Content Manager supports many layers/levels for Space management to reflect physical storage, administrators are encouraged to keep it as simple as possible and use a minimum of levels.
The larger the number of storage spaces created, the slower the performance in use of the Space management system.
For example, performance for 500 billion record spaces can be slow, whereas the performance for 500,000 record spaces will be much better - a top level with 500 shelves holding 1000 records - very basic.