Friday, 24 May 2013

SharePoint 2010 Expiration Date Field Empty - Information Management Policy

I have been having this problem over the past few days while testing a workflow which is being triggered using a retention stage of the Information management policy.

I was testing on some documents which had been uploaded into a records library in my dev environment.

If you upload a document into a normal document library the document should have an expiration date set immediately.

To update the expiration dates you can run the Information management policy job which sets and updates the expiration date for all documents.

 
 

Once the expiration date is set on the document the next time the Expiration Policy timer job runs it will trigger the next retention stage for that document.

The Expiration policy job should always be ran (or scheduled to run) after the Information management policy job.



If you are using a Records Centre and your documents are stored in a records library there could be the possibility that the expiration date is blank.

I discovered this and first of all tried running the jobs I mentioned above, but to no avail.




After some digging I found that if your records are saved to the records library by the content organizer rules then on arrival in the records library the expiration date is set.

However if you upload a document directly in to a records library the expiration date is not set on upload, and in my environment it was still not set after running the Information management policy job multiple times.

I have not found a solution for records uploaded directly to the records library, but by uploading records to the drop off library and using the routing rules to move them to the correct records library you will ensure that the expiration date is set on all records!



Hope this saves anyone researching this particular problem some time!

Thanks for reading,

Matt

4 comments:

  1. Hey,
    I'm having the same problem and I did some testing and I think the problem with me is not enough rights for the contributors.
    We are using an adapted permission level so contributors can only add but not edit.
    Apperently this is causing our problems.
    Anyone heard of that?

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  2. Hi Bob,

    Are all of your expiration date fields blank?

    Most Records Centres only allow users to add and not edit anyway, the timer jobs I mention should set the expiration dates regardless of user permissions! I haven't heard of any permission related reason for this problem.

    Are you using record libraries? or normal doc library?

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  3. I'm using an information management policy on a content type. The custum policy is to enable retention and after 1 day to move the item to the recycle bin.
    It's a normal list with two content types. One of them has the retention policy, the other one not.
    It is used for a time tracking system and so people can not edit their item after creation. What we discovered, is that people with no edit permissions can create without problems their new item but the field Expiration Date is left blank. People with edit rights aren't having that problem.
    During my first post and this one, I planned another test because when I look to the compliance details, the retention policy was activated on the item so now we are curious if the retention will work also on those items with expiration date left blank.

    We started to consider some time on this issue, when we got errors on our server on creation time. In fact, not being able to calculate and to fill in the expiration date (which seems to be an edit action) caused an error.

    So, I hope to give you tomorrow an update of our test. When the created items with a blank expiration date are also moved to the recycle bin, then we know what is causing the error and we know that people should also having edit rights on items when wanting to calculate the expiration date.

    Sounds exciting! :-)

    Thanks for your follow up.

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  4. Thanks Bob,

    Sounds interesting, so it seems if your uploading directly to a library without edit permissions it cannot set the field! I was having similar in my scenario where by if you upload directly into a record library it cannot set the expiration date field, so this IS caused by not having permissions to edit items in that list or library.

    When using the content organizer rules it doesn't have that problem as you can edit items in the drop off library!

    Its a shame you can only use a drop off library and organizer rules on document content types as if you could use them on a list that would solve your problem as it has mine.

    Let me know how your testing goes, I'd be interested to know the outcome.

    Regards

    Matt

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