This section provides some preliminary advice on mapping between business systems or applications and EDRMS to capture records created in a business system into an EDRMS.

The purpose of mapping metadata between a business system or application and an electronic document and records management system (EDRMS) is to aid in progressing to a stage where automatic capture of the records into the EDRMS from a business system or application is possible. There are many different techniques to automate capture of records from different systems, but all depend on good, reliable and documented metadata mapping.

The issues outlined in the section Using the Recordkeeping Schema as a Checklist for Conformance relating to finding and isolating standardised metadata in an EDRMS application system all apply to mapping to a business system. It is quite possible that a business system will group elements together that are required as separate elements in the recordkeeping metadata. This poses a challenge on how to identify such groupings and how to identify and determine best options for splitting the values out into more differentiated fields.

The business system is not likely to create more than the minimum recordkeeping metadata and is not designed to do so. It may be that some of the elements required for metadata are stored in the audit log of the system. There may be ways to add recordkeeping metadata such as date captured, or business system names etc, at the point of import into the EDRMS.