Enhanced Retention Management

The IBM® Content Manager OnDemand Enhanced Retention Management feature helps you manage and enforce retention of documents in a Content Manager OnDemand system.

In a Content Manager OnDemand system, you retain documents for a specific amount of time. Retaining documents for a certain amount of time is commonly referred to as retention management.

Records management describes the process of retaining and deleting documents under a set of circumstances that are not necessarily bounded by time, for example, until the end of litigation. Without the Enhanced Retention Management feature, Content Manager OnDemand cannot implement records management for the following reasons:

  • Records management requires that you have control over individual documents. However, Content Manager OnDemand manages application groups, not individual documents, and it works with a storage manager to delete (expire) documents.
  • Records management requires flexibility in defining when to delete documents. However, Content Manager OnDemand defines the time to delete application groups with fixed time ranges, for example, five years after Content Manager OnDemand loads documents.
To overcome these limitations, you can purchase and install the Enhanced Retention Management feature. With the Enhanced Retention Management feature, you can control individual documents by introducing holds, a way to identify the documents that you want to keep for some period of time. To expire the document, you need to remove the hold. Holds give you flexibility to choose when to delete documents because you control when to remove a hold. Therefore, you control when to delete a document. You can manage holds through any of the following interfaces:
  • OnDemand Windows clients, IBM Content Navigator, ARSDOC command, or ODWEK Java™ APIs provided by Content Manager OnDemand.
  • FileNet® P8 when you integrate it with Content Manager OnDemand by enabling the Content Federation Services-Content Manager OnDemand (CFS-CMOD) integration feature. The CFS-CMOD integration feature also helps you federate Content Manager OnDemand repositories, which connects your Content Manager OnDemand content to business process management (BPM) and records management features of FileNet P8.)
The Enhanced Retention Management feature also requires that you disable the expiration processes that your storage manager has on the documents that you want to hold. Disabling the expiration process prevents the storage manager from deleting these documents.

Do not enable Enhanced Retention Management if your documents are stored exclusively in a cache-only storage node. Documents that are stored in cache could be expired even if there is a hold placed on a document and the Life of Data and Indexes value has been reached. On IBM i servers, this means that the migration policy specified in the application group definition to which the documents belong must have at least one migration policy level with a media type other than Expire, so that the Archived Storage Manager (ASM) manages the data.

You can create the following types of holds:
Holds
You indicate, through the use of searches, the specific documents that you want to hold. You can apply holds to documents in any application group. Use this type of hold if you are using Content Manager OnDemand as your retention management tool.
Implied holds
When Content Manager OnDemand loads documents, it applies a hold to all the documents in that load. You can apply this type of hold only to documents in new application groups. Use this type of hold if you are using another solution as your retention management tool.
Holds provide the following flexibility:
  • You can create multiple holds.
  • You can apply multiple holds to a single document or documents.
  • You can apply a single hold to an unlimited number of documents.
  • You can place a hold on a document that is currently stored in your OnDemand system.
  • You can place a hold on a document when it is loaded into your OnDemand system.
For example, you create the following holds:
  • A hold named A to apply it to documents that are part of a litigation.
  • An implied hold named B to apply it to documents to comply with a government regulation and you use another solution to manage all documents subject to this regulation.
  • A hold named C to apply it to documents that are part of an internal policy.
You can place holds A and C on a single document. The document will not be expired until you remove all holds. You can apply hold A to documents in different application groups. You can apply implied hold B to documents you are loading to your OnDemand system. A week later, when you search for more documents for the litigation, you can apply hold A to documents that also have implied hold B. The documents will not be expired until you remove all holds.

After you install the Enhanced Retention Management feature, evaluate your Content Manager OnDemand maintenance procedures. During Content Manager OnDemand maintenance cycles, loads are deleted per your expiration policy. However, if a document in that load has a hold, Content Manager OnDemand will not delete that load. Keeping the document can have the following consequences:

  • Your OnDemand Storage Manager might consume space faster than you initially planned.
  • Keeping the other documents that do not have a hold in that load makes them potentially discoverable.
  • When you run arsmaint or Disk Storage Manager, Content Manager OnDemand might repeatedly reload these loads, causing unnecessary strain on your system.

The following commands can help you manage some of these consequences:

  • ARSMAINT and ARSADMIN UNLOAD, specifying the -D parameter
  • STRDSMOND command, specifying the HLDTHLD parameter

With these commands, you specify how full a load must be before it can be reloaded, at which point Content Manager OnDemand deletes the documents that do not have holds and reloads the load.