At a ceremony held at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) on 26 September 2018, H.E. Dr. Ali bin Saud Al Bemani, Vice Chancellor of SQU, and H.E. Dr. Hamad bin Mohammad Al Dhouyeni, Head of the National Records and Archives Authority (NRAA), approved the 'Private Records Management System' at the University by adopting the schedules of documents’ extended retention and classification system.

The adoption procedures went through several stages. The last stage was the final approval of the authority on the schedules and systems of classification. The approval comes under the National Records and Archives Law promulgated by Royal Decree 60/2007. Article 18 of the law states that a department is responsible for its documents till they are not needed, and that each party shall coordinate with the National Records and Archives Authority to prepare and implement a system for its records.

The Authority in coordination with specialized bodies and administrative structure at the University prepared a nominal list of the documents’ types and private records at the university, which resulted in the completion of the procedural tools, namely, the preparation of the schedules of documents’ extended retention and classification system.

The procedural tools of the Private Document Management System include the preparation of the schedules of documents’ extended retention and classification system. This comes after completion of preparing the nominal list of the University's private documents. These procedural tools are considered as a keystone of forming a modern and new system according to the latest international standards adopted in this field. This system can be applied in documents processing since its inception and through the stages that pass through, and this will help in reducing all operations of destruction, transfer and relay of documents on one hand and respect the duration of retention on the other hand.

Once the system is implemented, the Department, in coordination with the Authority's specialists, will train the concerned parties on the ways to implement the various tools of the document management system. The classification also applies to the types of documents and files that are returned to the government unit, which reach several hundred. With the adoption of this system, the project of forming a modern document management system at the level of the entities subject to the Documentation and Archives Act will enter a new stage on applying the Documentation and Archives Act. It is worth mentioning that the number of entities that have adopted its system so far is 52.