[SharePoint] - Document archive warnings

Question

Hi all

Is there an out of the box solution to check the validity of documents? Let's say when a document has been in a document library for 1 year, the author should get a warning, an e-mail for example, to revise the document.

I didn't find this in SharePoint. So I was thinking of creating my own feature for this:

• A timer job which runs every night and check all the documents in the site collection
• The timer job can be configured through an admin page in the central admin, for example to configure on which site collections in a web application the job should run.

My concern is, when running this in a heavily used environment, doesn't it burden the servers too much? Let's say for example an environment with 100.000 documents spread out over 5 site collections. And how about looping through all those document libraries in various SPWebs, use an SPSiteDataQuery to retrieve all those documents and loop through that collection? Because opening each document library in each SPWeb in 5 SPSites...

Or is there an other option to accomplish this? With workflows? Because in the end, the owner of the document receives a warning and he needs to confirm if the document is still valid. I haven't touched workflows much to be quite honest.

I would like to hear your thoughts about this.

Maarten.

Answer 1

This SO Question may give you some ideas - workflow/timer jobs/3rd party etc as in essence your requirement for email alerts when documents are 1 year old is basically the same as 'a task is overdue'

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/529045/dated-reminders-in-sharepoint-calendars

Re: Load - well I can't give you specifics as every situation is different but you've got the ability to run this overnight so I can't imagine that it would really be much of a problem.

Also Remember your not actually retrieving/parsing the documents themselves, just the record containing the documents meta-data such as title, location, modified date, assigne to etc.

Answer 2

this sounds like a job for powershell. write a little script that queries the document lib's for documents that are older than one year. then send a email alert or create a task for the user to update the document.

also i would not worry about having 1000's or workflow runing. WFF is an enterprise product. i have had over 60000 running without any problems.