Publication expiration
There are many occasions when a document has only temporal value to the organization. After a designated period of time, the document has no further value to the business process. Here are a few examples of such documents:
| |
· |
Company event announcements
|
| |
· |
Temporary changes to Web site content
|
| |
· |
Temporary changes to official procedures that do not impact the quality assurance or document control process. This may include information about contact telephone numbers or procedures during a manager's period of absence, notification of a supplier that should be used until an authorized supplier is again able to deliver, etc.
|
All of these documents have two things in common: they expire—and after expiration, they do not need to be maintained online for end-user access. It may in some cases be useful, however, to retain the source documents for future use as templates or for archiving purposes. For such documents it is useful to have the notion of a publication expiration date.
Using Hyper.Net's publication expiration function, an author can save a document into SharePoint, configure it to automatically publish to the required audiences in the required applications and then configure the resulting publication to automatically remove itself from all of those systems on a specified date. The author need not worry about remembering to manually delete the document or its publication from the system on the required date. The publication is automatically removed and the source document remains in the SharePoint document library for future use.
Hyper.Net provides the publication metadata ExpirationDate for this purpose. This metadata is not referenced in a document type profile because it would not make sense to associate a static expiration date with a group of documents as time goes on. You can, however, add this value to your content types using the procedure described in Copying standard publication metadata to a custom content type. For example:
Once the ExpirationDate metadata has been added to a content type, you have three choices (configuring this option is a standard SharePoint task not described here):
| |
· |
Make it required: The author must enter a date/time specifying the expiration date for the document. The publication will be automatically removed from the publication library at the given time.
|
| |
· |
Make it optional: If the user enters a date/time setting, the publication will be automatically removed from the publication library at the given time. If no value is provided, the publication will not expire.
|
| |
· |
Make it hidden: The user will not see the property and will not be able to enter a value. You can, however, add additional programming that will automatically set the date when the document is saved. For example, you could automatically set the publication to expire two years from the save date.
|
| |
|
|
Note
|
When a document with an expiration date is saved into SharePoint, two requests are sent to the Hyper.Net Request Queue: (1) the transformation request and (2) a publication deletion request with a future processing date equivalent to the specified expiration date.
If the document has been published and has not yet expired, and the author then modifies the document and saves it again, the previous publication's pending deletion request is deleted. The new version's transformation and publication deletion requests are sent to the Request Queue, and the previous publication is replaced.
Although you can do it (it is enabled to allow you to handle emergency situations), it is not advisable to delete a document's pending publication deletion request from the Request Queue. The result of this action is that the publication will remain in the publication library although the document properties in SharePoint show that the publication should have expired. This is a violation of good document control practices and will lead you to develop poor document control habits. The source document and its profile are king! To remove a publication deletion request, edit the document properties in SharePoint, remove the value specified for ExpirationDate and save the document again. Hyper.Net will automatically adjust the Request Queue as needed.
|
| |
|
|
Tip
|
Remember that you do not need to created a Filtered Value field mapping in the Hyper.Net schema associated with the document type profile for the content type because ExpirationDate is a publication metadata.
|
| |
|
|
Tip
|
Hyper.Net does not remove source documents from SharePoint when their publications expire. If you wish to automatically remove source documents, you must program this yourself.
|
| |
|
|
Tip
|
Transformation requests in the Request Queue that are pending execution on a future date are found in the Pending Future view:
|