Data archiving guidelines

[Mike Pokraka]

Hi Karri, 

 

I have tried to split archiving and non-archiving workflows once before and
I don’t think I managed to get it to work. You may find some posts of mine
in the archives on the subject. Archiving is simply not designed that way,
it’s all-or-nothing. 

 

Remember also that workflow provides more info than just whodunit. Why did X
approve it? Workflow will tell you whether he was a substitute, or if Y
forwarded it to him. There may be a rejections and modification before
approval and comments and attachments. Never underestimate the value of the
log.

 

My take on it: It’s not worth the effort. Unless you have serious volumes I
would just archive everything. The archive files are not that big and
storage is not exactly expensive these days. 

 

Cheers, 

Mike

 

 

From: sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of
Karri Kemppi
Sent: 03 February 2008 13:30
To: sap-wug at mit.edu
Subject: Data archiving guidelines

 

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

 

 

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