The short answer is "Yes". But how?
And what does archiving mean? If you talk to the business they understand it like this: You have a bunch of documents which you carry several levels downstairs into the basement of the building and there they will sit for 10...30 years until someone comes and puts them into the Reisswolf and later those remaining pieces get recycled and new paper is created. Nice.
--> What that means is, when most people talk about archiving or archive duration, it means the time the document remains available until it gets destroyed.
In ServiceNow this is a two step approach, let's take CSM Case Management (this is actually a recent example from one of my clients):
1) You need to create an Archive Rule. This rule determines when the record is moved from the case table to the archive table (in the old world: This is the time when your paper documents are taken from the shelf in your office downstairs into the basement). To make this simple you can agree on the number of days how long the case needs to remain in the case table - in my case we decided for 24 months from case creation. This is done via system property to remain a bit flexible and the archive date is actually written into the case (custom field) so that it can be easily used in our Archive Rule, see picture below. Basically the duration is driven by how many days you need for your reporting - I recommend to have at least one year of data. This also depends on the case volume, we have roughly 10.000 records per month.
Now we have it archived, but how are we doing the "Reisswolf" part?
2) The ServiceNow answer to that question is "Archive Destroy Rule" - or maybe not?
In such destroy rule you can specify how many days the record shall remain in the archive until it gets deleted from the platform. In our case we needed more flexibility because different parts of the business were using that one case table and they had different requirements (different durations) for archiving the case data. The different types of data are determined by service catalog category and support case (two custom fields). We created a configuration (M2M) table where for each such category and support case combination you can now specify how many years the data shall remain in the system - anything between 1 and 30 years. Also here we created a new date field on our case table and the "Destroy date" gets calculated when the case is closed or cancelled.
To delete the archived case data we decided to create a table cleaner job as you can see below.
That's it!
Let me know how you archive your data, in or outside of ServiceNow? How are you doing it? Or what external tools are you using?
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Thanks!
