There might be situations when you need to suspend the normal disposition schedule for one or more entities to ensure their availability beyond the approved retention period. Examples of such situations include a court case or an investigation during which you cannot dispose of records, regardless of their disposition schedule. In such situations, you can place a disposition hold on the records or on a container that holds the records. Later, you can remove the disposition hold when you want to resume the disposition actions.
You can place a disposition hold on a record category, record folder, volume, or record, and can place the hold before the cutoff date or during any of the phases after the cutoff date. When the hold is placed on a container, it applies to all of the entities in the container. While the holds remain in effect, the system will not launch the workflow attached to the applicable disposition action for that entity. In other words, the associated disposition schedule becomes temporarily ineffective. Also, no one can manually delete any entities that are on hold.
You can place more than one disposition hold on an entity. Holds can be placed manually or conditionally, according to criteria you specify. For conditional holds, a sweep process finds entities that meet the criteria and places the holds automatically. Conditional holds apply dynamically. Entities that satisfy the criteria of the hold can be added at any time and the hold will be placed on those entities during the next scheduled Hold Sweep.
When you place an entity on hold, you will need to specify which disposition hold to use. Therefore, you must first configure disposition holds by adding them to the system. Holds can be active or inactive. Only active holds can be placed on entities.