When you deploy new SharePoint intranet or public site one of the greatest issues is to keep your content up to date. Department leads who are in charge of keeping the content fresh don’t have time to update the site and after a while no one is using the site because, well, everything is out of date there and it’s practically it useless.
One of the cool things in SharePoint 2010 is tight integration with out of the box workflows and content retention policy. In here I will demonstrate how you can remind your content authors responsible for maintaining a document library to update their information.
Let’s open a regular document library and add a new workflow to it:
Pick a workflow that best suits the purpose – I will pick an Approval workflow to make sure my content author approves current version of the document and therefore declares it to be current, here are some settings I have set. The Approvers field will hold a group or an individual responsible for keeping the content fresh, everything else is pretty much optional to my scenario:
Now i need a process that will trigger this workflow, say, every 30 days and send a reminder to an approver to make an approval. To do that I will go to my document library settings and click Information Management Policy settings. Then I’ll chose Document as my content type.
I will select Enable Retention and click Add a retention stagemeaning that you can have several action you can take to items in the document library. In my case I will add just one. I will choose to activate my workflow every 30 days, here are the settings I used:
That’s it. If you care to create more customized action rather than approval workflow you can use SharePoint Designer and make your custom workflow that could be called from Retention settings. Although in this case we’re using just a regular document library, you can apply the same logic to your page library in a publishing site scenario – which will make sure your content authors have updated their site pages.
Good Luck!
