For any digital workplace older than a year, Archiving is essential. It streamlines your searches, and keeps your content fresh and current. Policies can be configured based on content type, or at the Channel level, and will clean up content based on rules that you set, making it easy for members to see what's active and relevant to them, and what's historical information available for reference. 

Once an item is archived, it can't be edited or commented on, and it doesn't appear by default when searching. The "Show Archived" option in the Advanced Search lets you filter to include archived items. The archiving process never deletes your content, but your Igloo will keep it out of the way until you need to go looking for it. 

Virtues of archiving

As people use your digital workplace, they'll create content. As your Igloo and your organization grow, and given a bit of time, they'll create a lot of content. Soon you're looking at dozens of recurring team meetings, holidays, vacation events, organizational announcements, and forum questions. Dozens turn to hundreds, and hundreds turn to thousands. There are organizations using Igloo who have hundreds of thousands of articles and files in their digital workplace. 

As that growth happens, an archiving strategy is essential, and the policies, accessible from the Manage Archive area in your Control Panel, make it easy to implement. Using policies, you can archive events after they end, or your announcements as they age, ensuring that your searches are current. 

Archiving flow

There are a few ways to archive content. During publishing, an author can set a date to archive it, which will take precedence over the policy. Administrators can archive or unarchive things whenever they please, using the action button on the item. But most commonly it will be through policies at the digital workplace level, or at the Channel level. 

Once an item meets the conditions for archiving, it enters the grace period, which can be configured from the Global Settings area of your Control Panel. The default is fifteen days, after which the item is archived. It still remains exactly where it was in the Channel, and members who navigate to it will see a flag that says the item has been archived. Once an item is in the archive, the only way to remove it is for an Administrator to unarchive it manually. Spaces have their own individual archives, letting Space Administrators manage archiving for their area. 

Grace period

The grace period is the space between when an item meets the conditions for archiving and when it's archived. It's usually fifteen days, and puts an alert on the item that tells members it's scheduled to be archived. That way if it's been placed in the queue by mistake, like a project that's being picked up again, they can alert the Administrators, or edit the Channel and adjust the policy there. More often than not, since content that's scheduled to be archived is content that no one is actively using, the grace period goes unmarked. 

You can find some archiving best practices in our article on planning for the future of your digital workplace, and if you have questions about this feature, you can leave a comment here, or ask a question in the Community area. 

For information about the latest release and the upcoming product roadmap, attend our What's New in Igloo webinar on August 23 at 11am ET.