Lifecycle policy properties (General tab)

The lifecycle policy property sheet's General tab shows general information about the selected lifecycle policies, including its name, states, and lifecycle action.

If you make any changes to a lifecycle policy that is already assigned to a document, those changes immediately apply to the existing document. Therefore, you must take care when modifying a lifecycle policy already assigned to a document.

For example, let's say you add a lifecycle state to a policy assigned to an existing document. You can position the state anywhere within the defined states. Based on the document's current state, promoting or demoting the document's state may move the document to the new state.

On the other hand, deleting a state causes any document that is currently in that state to become invalid. Application operations and workflows that depend on this state will fail.

CAUTION  Do not delete states on a policy assigned to documents on a production system unless you have taken explicit steps to deal with these potentially serious consequences.

NOTE  For help opening a lifecycle policy property sheet, see View and modify lifecycle policy properties.

Name
Displays the name of the lifecycle policy. If desired, you can rename the lifecycle action by typing over the existing name.

The name is required and must start with a letter. The lifecycle policy name can contain up to 64 characters (upper or lowercase letters, numbers, spaces, and symbols).

Description
Provides descriptive information about the lifecycle policy. The description can contain up to 255 characters and is optional. If desired, you can modify this description.

Use the description to explain requirements of the lifecycle policy or any other information you find useful. The name and description can be included in reports or viewed with administrative tools.

States
Lists all defined states. The list box provides a table that shows you the states added to the lifecycle policy. The table presents the following columns:
Command buttons
The buttons at the right of the wizard screen provide options for creating and modifying the lifecycle policy:
Reset lifecycle on new version
Select this option to restart the lifecycle state cycle when the user creates a new version of the document.
Preserve Direct ACEs
Select this box to keep the document direct (non-inherited) access permissions. If this box is not selected, the document permissions are replaced with the lifecycle policy access permissions.
Lifecycle Action
Displays the name of the lifecycle action associated with this policy.
Set up lifecycle states
The following topics show you how to set up lifecycle states.

To change the state sequence

In the list box, select the state whose order you want to move and do one of the following:

To add a new state

  1. Click Add to display the State dialog box.
  2. In the State Name field, enter the name you want to assign to the state. For example, if you're creating a lifecycle policy for a loan application, you could call the first state, Application.
  3. Specify whether the document in the current state is eligible for demotion:
  4. Click OK to save the newly defined state and return to the previous screen. The new state appears at the bottom of the list box.

To modify an existing state

  1. Select the desired state on the list box.
  2. Click Modify to display the State dialog box.
  3. Modify the definitions as desired:
  4. Click OK to save the modified state and return to the previous screen.

To remove a state

  1. Select the state you want to remove from the list box. (You cannot select more than one state at a time.)
  2. Click Remove to delete the selected state from your list.