Your firm has published, or will soon publish, a policy for document retention and destruction that is designed to minimize legal exposure during e-discovery. In all likelihood, one of the major issues the firm faces is this: how will it help users like you abide by this policy on your own desktop machine, given that you have many other competing priorities?

To help you abide by the policy consistently but with minimal effort, your firm has implemented a tracking system called NextPage Document Retention. To use this system, you identify documents that need to be tracked as part of your corporate document retention program, at the moment that you first create them. The system silently tracks them even when you move them, rename them, or send them in e-mail. When it is time to carry out the retention policy, it helps you upload important files to a shared location and destroy others that remain on your and your teammates’ machines.

This approach enables you to receive instant, real-time information about how many different copies of a specific document exist, whether different versions have been uploaded to a central retention server, and whether copies of documents have been deleted from local systems.

Normally, you should not activate the Client Service on your machine until instructed to do so by your system administrator. Your system administrator will choose the right time, given your project’s lifecycle and the firm-wide rollout schedule for the software.

To activate, double-click the attachment in an activation e-mail that your system administrator arranges to send you. The attachment is tied to your e-mail address, can be used only once, and expires after ten days. It contains a small amount of information that the Global Service uses to securely confirm that your machine belongs to you.

If you do not want to wait for your system administrator to send you an activation e-mail, or you need a new one, you can request one yourself by right-clicking the NextPage Document Retention icon in the system tray on your unactivated machine and choosing Request Activation E-mail.