Shorter Retention Periods in QA

As announced last week, the minimum retention periods is now drastically reduced in QA.  Using the ‘Retention Policy,‘ section of the Settings console, it is possible for the account owner to specify when a completed record is to be archived and when archived records are to be trashed.  The minimum retention period before a record is placed in the archive is 14 months.  And the minimum retention period that a record needs to stay in the archive before it is automatically moved to the trash is also 14 months.

These minimum retention periods of 14 months work well, because it allows all organizations involved in the completion of a request, or another type of record, to generate reports that include over a year’s worth of data without worrying about records not being included because they have already been archived or trashed.

In the QA environment, however, organizations perform many tests that clutter their Xurrent accounts.  It would therefore be nice if the records in QA could be removed sooner.  That is why the minimum retention period has been reduced in the QA environment from 14 months to just 1 month.

To explain how retention periods work, it may be best to use an example.  When a request is set to ‘Completed’ today and the retention period for the archive is 24 months and the retention period for the trash is 14 months, then this request will automatically be moved to the archive 24 months from today.  It will then remain in the archive for 14 months.  At that point, it is moved automatically to the trash.  So, 38 months after the request was completed, the request is placed in the trash.  There it will still spend another 28 days, after which it is automatically (and irrevocably) erased.