The AODocs Retention Module is a feature of the AODocs Document Management Platform, included in the AODocs Application Platform license level. It lets you automate the retention and disposal of the documents stored in your AODocs libraries.

Automatically generated table of contents

What are retention policies?

A retention policy (or deletion policy) is a set of rules defined for specific documents. It details how long documents are retained once they are controlled by the AODocs Retention Module (retention period) before being deleted.

Companies and organizations may need to implement retention policies on their documents for business requirements, such as legal reasons or to save storage space. Your company or organization may need several retention policies for different types of document.

Managing retention policies with AODocs

Retention schedules

When you use the AODocs Retention Module, each retention policy defined by your company or organization is associated with a retention schedule. This retention schedule is used to apply all the characteristics of the retention policy.

In your AODocs libraries, you can define retention schedules:

• at the root level
• at any folder level
• based on one or more property (metadata) values – these retention schedules are always assigned at the library level and are applied to all document classes with retention properties defined

Using one or more retention schedules in an AODocs library

As a library administrator, you can define which types of retention schedules to use in the AODocs libraries you manage.

Within the same library, you can use:

• several retention schedules at the root level (but only one that isn't based on property values)
• a mixture of retention schedules assigned to the root level or folders and retention schedules based on property values

If you assign a retention schedule to the root level or to a folder, the life cycle of all the subfolders and documents is managed by this retention schedule. 

Note: If you assign a retention schedule to the root level or to a folder in your library, all the document classes in the library must have a folder structure defined.

To assign several retention schedules to different folders in your library, organize your folder structure appropriately.

Below is an example of several retention policies at different levels in a library.

Note: If you're using retention in a library, you must assign at least one retention schedule at the library level (either a retention schedule assigned to the root folder or a retention schedule based on property values).

In the event of conflicts between retention schedules within your library, the retention schedules with the latest deletion dates are applied. For example, in the example above, RP4 and RP5 are applied only if their deletion dates are later than those defined by RP1, RP2 and RP3. 

Learn more: What happens when you use retention in AODocs libraries?