Data archiving guidelines

[Karri Kemppi]

Hi all,
 
I am currently in the process of estimating the data archiving of work items. Transaction SARA, the archiving object WORKITEM, and the process of data archiving are familiar to me. 
 
We have multiple different workflow processes running. The requirements for archiving/retention etc. have not yet been defined, but I assume that the information, which must be available the next N amount of years, is the approval related information of the documents within the workflows (who approved travel expense X in year 2006, etc.).
 
In many scenarios this kind of information is already stored in the application/document itself – you can see who has changed the status of a document to approved, etc. This leads to the fact that it is just a few document types, for which you need to go into the workflow log to find out the agent of a certain (approval) task. And this leads to the situation, that if you use the standard archiving object WORKITEM, you are archiving lots of unnecessary data. It would be just the few workflow types that require archiving, since their documents’ approval data is only available in the workflow log.
 
How do you handle this? Do you just archive everything? Or do you for example build your workflows at the first place in a way that all the relevant data is stored (also) in somewhere else (where?) than the work item tables (and then you don’t have to archive the work items permanently - just delete them)? 
 
Any discussion & guidelines regarding this issue are most welcome.
 
Best regards,
Karri
 
_________________________________________________________________
Windows Vista + Windows Live. Astu digitaaliseen maailmaan.
http://get.live.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/sap-wug/attachments/20080203/92919641/attachment.htm