The following blog post comes from Fishbowl Senior Software Consultant Alan Mackenthun. Alan is Fishbowl’s resident records management expert and has been architecting such systems for over nine years. In working with a WebCenter customer, Alan was able to propose a solution that will enable the customer to configure WebCenter so that a group of users can be dynamically assigned to review dispositions. This isn’t a well-documented feature so we wanted to share it with the rest of the WebCenter community.
At its core records management is the management of the destruction of content when it’s no longer needed. Usually, business processes dictate that someone review the content and approve destruction before the content is permanently deleted. Out of the box, you can either assign a specific user as a reviewer on a retention step or you could allow the default system reviewer alias to review dispositions, but there was no way to assign a group of users or to dynamically assign users.
Assigning a specific user may work in smaller organizations but even then, if a specific user is assigned and then they go on vacation or leave the company, all related disposition rules would have to be found and updated. It was very difficult to make this work in a larger organization where document owners could be spread among separate business units or departments.
With the enhancement documented in the TKB referenced below, you can easily reference an alias in disposition rules. To do so simply enter:
alias:<myAlias>
as the reviewer where “<my alias>” is the name of the alias you’d like to reference. The real benefit here is that if you have Departmental Record Coordinators (DRCs) who review content in certain categories scheduled for destruction (disposition), you can assign the alias rather than named users. Then if the DRC changes, the client only needs to update the alias, rather than all categories where that DRC was referenced.
Additionally, leveraging the ability to reference a script function gives you much more power. Some categories of content, such as correspondence or memos, span all business units and departments. On the other hand, there isn’t one person or group in an organization who should be approving the destruction of this content. Instead, this feature allows you to reference a script function that can take the value of a business unit and/or department metadata field and map the value of this organizational unit to a user or alias who would be assigned as the reviewer. To do so simply enter:
script:<myScript>
as the reviewer where “<myscript>” is the name of the custom IdocScript function you’d like to reference (of course we at Fishbowl would be happy to help implement such a function if needed).
Oracle Support Document 1470906.1 (How to Request Approval Notification for a Group of People for a Disposition Action) can be found at: https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=1470906.1
