Lifecycle Management with Alfresco

[mario_rieger]

Dear All,

I became acquainted to Alfresco a couple of days ago and it seems to be an applicable tool to create a Records/Document Management System for a company.

To gain insight to the programme I have ordered the several guides about installation, administration and starting, which gives me a broad overview of the system.

But there are several questions unsolved! For this reason I beg you, to give me some answers to the following questions.

1. How can one reproduce the startegy of the Information Lifecycle Mangement?

2. Is there a possibility to distinguish active from inactive Documents? Is there may be a possibility to say, that documents (a) older than 60 days or (b) not used for around 30 days will become an inactive status!

3. How can I save the inactive documents on a inexpensive storage medium?

4. Is there a possibility to integrate a retention period to documents? What will happen, if the retention period is expired? Will the owner of the document will be informed? Is there a deletion of the documents practicable?

5. If documents are needed in case of litigation, is there a possibility to transfer all needed documents in a new file? Is there also a possibility to re-integrate the documents after litigation in the old structure?

It would be very kind, if you could answer my questions.

Thanks a lot and best wishes from Germany.

Mario Rieger

[paulhh]

Hi

There's a bunch of things you can do now, especially using the JavaScript capabilities coupled with the scheduled actions feature.

For example, you can have an action that runs every night that gets all documents not modified for 30 days and execute a script that changes a property value to inactive for each document, plus changes permissions on it.

You can also use the "soft" delete feature to delete objects via a timed query or script.  The deleted objects are recoverable, but stored and indexed in a separate workspace (by default, that is still on the same filesystem).

You can add a retention period as a property to any object - the best way is by defining an aspect with this property.  Again, using timed actions, you can have a nightly script that does whatever you want.  You could also use folders and rules to achieve similar effects.

Take a look at the scripting capabilities in the wiki:
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/JavaScript_API
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Scheduled_Actions

Plus the content modelling capabilities:
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Developer_Guide#Creating_new_Content_Models

Also, look at the general rules and actions available in Alfresco.

We are planning to release a preview of Records Management capabilities after 1.4.

Cheers
Paul.