Employee Document Management Q&A

[nickdonatelli]

The following questions and answers pertain to behaviors researched and observed in the course of implementing EDM for a large multi-national in the process of rolling out EDM across their enterprise. Most of the below are what I would refer to as Infrequently Asked Questions and thus may be of greater value to organizations ready to take the next step toward greater maturity in using EDM.

Q; What happens to attachments on a case when they have been moved to EDM? Are they still available as attachments to the fulfiller/requester?

A: No, once attachments have been moved they are no longer available on the case attachments. If the document has been associated to a document type which the fulfiller can view/edit, the document will now appear under the employee documents tab/sidebar menu in agent workspace, but the requester cannot view the document, unless the requester is the employee associated to the document and the document type allows employee access, in which case it will be visible on the EC. If a document is associated to the subject person of a case, the Opened for user cannot view the employee document record and document created for the subject person.

Q: Can the create/edit document page be configured to allow customer-specific fields?

A: In short, no. The EDM uses UI pages for upload/edit/viewing of documents, and moving attachments from a case in order to ensure a one attachment per one document record relationship. Since these are UI pages, any modifications would require fairly extensive customization. This is not recommended. If a customer is insistent upon customizing these pages, (1) the originals should be cloned so that customers can revert back to OOTB relatively easily, and (2) both the Upload/Edit page and Move Attachments pages will very likely need to be customized (depending on the customizations to be made) to ensure that the appropriate data is being collected via both methods of document record creation.

Q: Can insert and stay be used when creating documents?

A: No, no such capability is available OOTB because the create/edit document page is a UI page

Q: The 'HR Case' field on the employee document form is a search - what does it search?

A: This field searches all cases for which the 'Employee' of the document record is the subject person or opened for of a case

Q: What does the 'Purge Hold' field mean? What do the drop down values do?

A: Purge Hold is used in two circumstances. (1) Documents in Legal Hold will have 'Legal Hold' as the Purge Hold value and will be skipped from any applicable purge jobs (2) Documents for employees that are eligible for purge which fit Security Policies that require Purge Authorization. In the second scenario, the below applies:

A scheduled job executes that checks documents that are due to be purged in the coming month and which require purge authorization (by virtue of fitting a security policy that requires purge authorization) and sends a notification out 7 days prior to the beginning of that month to members of the designated Purge Authorization groups for those documents. Those group members will see the 'Authorize All' and 'Reject All' UI buttons at the top of the Search Employee Documents list view page. Any documents which members of that Purge Authorization group can see to which the security policy applies will automatically have the 'Pending Purge Authorization' state applied in the 'Purge Hold' field.

If 'Authorize All' is clicked, the 'Purge Hold' state changes to 'Purge Approved' automatically and the documents will be purged when its purge date arrives.

If 'Reject All' is clicked the 'Purge Hold' state changes to 'Purge Rejected' automatically and the documents will be skipped when the purge job executes.

Documents in a state of 'Pending Purge Authorization' can also be individually or selectively approved or rejected using the checkbox(es) next to those documents, then by clicking the 'Actions on selected rows' dialog box at the bottom of the page and choosing either Authorize or Reject.

Documents in a state of Purge Rejected or Pending Authorization at the time of the scheduled purge job execution remain in either state until the sn_hr_ef.admin changes or removes the state. If a document is rejected for purge in one instance of a purge authorization/purge job, the Purge Hold state needs to be reset to 'null' manually by the sn_hr_ef.admin in order to be 'caught' by the system on the next purge cycle. Only sn_hr_ef.admin has the ability to change the purge hold state.

Q: Does EDM have any file naming conventions that it will enforce?

A: No. Documents can be renamed if needed using the [Rename] option on the document record. Auto-generated documents within SN will have a predefined naming convention and should not need to be renamed, however, documents submitted via case work that originate outside of SN do not have any OOTB restrictions. A possible solution to this is to use Flow Designer to rename the attachment based on available data when a document is created/edited.

Q: Are there any specific file extensions that are not allowed?

A: Not by EDM itself. There may be limitations placed on what file extensions are allowed at the platform properties level, so it's best to check with the platform team for confirmation. As a process decision, some companies may elect to only upload PDFs but within EDM there isn't any way to enforce that OOTB

Q: Can document download be restricted/prevented?

A: No, documents can be downloaded as long as a person minimally has the sn_hr_ef.document_reader role and meets any relevant security policies to access the document.

Q: Can multiple files bundled in a zip file for download?

A: Yes, this is a configurable EDM property (sn_hr_ef.enable_download_multiple). This is enabled OOTB.

Q: Can temporary/time-sensitive URLs to view documents be generated and distributed? Can managers view documents of their direct reports?

A: No, no such capability exists. Access needs to be granted via the sn_hr_ef.document_reader role and the viewer being associated to the appropriate security policies by having one of the roles or belonging to one of the groups defined as having read/write permission - as such there is not an ability for managers to have access to their direct reports' documents unless given that permission on the back end. In some instances managers may submit documents as attachments to be moved to the EDM/personnel file for their directs - once those attachments have been moved managers will no longer have access to the attachments so it may be advisable for managers to retain copies of employee documents if process/necessity warrants it.

Q: How does 'The frequency in days that purge dates will be recalculated for Employee documents' property work?

A:  This is a system performance setting that offsets how frequently document purge dates are recalculated on a document by document basis so that all document purge dates are not calculated at the same time

Q: Can the attachment of an existing employee document record be replaced?

A: No, once created, the attachment cannot be replaced. If a new version of a document needs to be uploaded, a new document record should be created.

Q: Which EDM roles can delete (outside of a purge) Employee document records?

A: Only sn_hr_ef.admin can delete documents outside of a purge.

Q: Can purged documents be restored?

A: No - once purged, these documents are gone. If there are concerns over documents being inadvertently purged, this may be a case for using purge authorization on security policies to ensure that documents are reviewed and approved for purge prior to being purged.

Q: Can the list of available legal hold reasons be modified?

A: Yes, this is just an issue of modifying the available choices for the choice list.

Q: Can we restrict where a document can be downloaded (i.e. to a particular folder, onedrive, box, etc.)?

A: Not within EDM. Download location is typically a browser setting so this is something that would need to be investigated by company IT.

Q: How do file names in other languages that utilize non-western character sets work?

A: Those file names will remain as they appear, no automatic translation occurs. So 'Тестовый документ.pdf' (Russian for Test Document.pdf) will appear exactly thus in the EDM. This again underscores the importance of having well-defined document types.

Q: Does EDM make any changes to encoding/character sets within a document upon upload?

A: No, the document's original properties are retained.

[Rajender1]

Hi @nickdonatelli,

I want to add Sub type as reference below the Document type field which should store in a new table named as Sub Type. How to do this in UI page?