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Expiry Date alert for Documents

dmohan
3-Visitor

Expiry Date alert for Documents

Hi All,

We maintain a lot of documents in Windchill that gets expired every year and has to be replaced with a new set fo documents or updated as per new standardization guide lines.

Currently to keep a track of time and the approaching expiry date, for a Windchill document, we use Excel. Is there an option in Windchill to track the expiry date of a document and may be alert the user before the date approaches? Something similar to the calendar alert functionality in MS Outlook.

4 REPLIES 4
sm
1-Newbie
1-Newbie
(To:dmohan)

I am not aware of any OOTB feature to support this, but I'm assuming you could create an attribute to track the expiration date and use Search, Report, Monitor or Customization to seek out expired content every day/week.

There is some possibility you could also use Effectivity to track the date, but I am not the expert on Effectivity.

There is no Idea submitted for this capability and there should definitely be one. I have linked this discussion to a backlog item in the PTC R&D backlog to make sure it is addressed in a future release of Windchill.

MikeLockwood
22-Sapphire I
(To:dmohan)

I did this for Patents in the past (we created a library specifically for Patent Documents from the goverment (PDFs). Assigned a soft type with this attribute and a few other specific to patents.

To automaticallly pay attention to the date, you can:

- Create a query builder report that returns all these documents

- Add a criteria that the expiry date be < today - 10 days or something like this

- Create a saved report from this, then a data monitor from this (new for 10.x

- Set it to run every day. If it returns any results, have it email all members of some group

WIth this, you essentially have a "listener" for anything that can be reported on that noitfies all members of a group; can add/remove people from the group w/o changing the report.

Thanks Mike. I think this is a good idea. I am gonna check this out.

kpritchard
4-Participant
(To:dmohan)

Using available OOTB functionality, I could see a sub-type WTDocument with an Advanced Lifecycle and Workflow attached. The Workflow for the State in question could hvae a timer that evaluates expiry date against current date and any offset specified and generate a Workflow Task to a responsible Role to refresh and resubmit.

Would require some minor Java code in the Workflow to access IBA's on your WTDocument and to do Date math.

The thing that I am unable to speak to is performance implact with a bunch of documents with running workflows with timers embedded. But with this apprach there is no deep customization.

The better solution would be one developed by PTC that you could schedule like publishing to evaluate Document Obejcts for expiry and take some form of action or generate a report.

Effectivity (Effective Date) ties in more to the front end... i.e. when a Document should be available for use and start being used

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