Some of the information collected by activities becomes outdated or old and no longer needs to remain in the system. To handle this, you can set up InterAction to automatically purge older activities.
Whether or not an activity should ever be purged, and how long it should be kept before this takes place, is highly dependent on the type of information stored in the activity. For example, a phone number change is only important for a few weeks after it takes place — once the people who communicate with the contact know about the change, the activity is no longer valuable.
On the other hand, an activity that records notes from a phone call or meeting with a client continues to provide valuable information about your organization’s interactions with the client indefinitely.
To manage this, you can set default expiration settings for each activity type. These settings determine the following:
- Do activities created using the type expire by default?
- For those that do expire, at what point should they expire (for example, after two weeks, 60 days, two years, etc.).
- Should end users be allowed to override the expiration settings?
Users can see the expiration date on the Other tab when viewing or editing an activity. This is illustrated in the Web Client below; the options in the Windows Client are similar.
When an activity expires, it is automatically purged from InterAction the next time the database maintenance script is run. You schedule the database maintenance script to run on a regular basis with Process Manager.
Many of the out-of-the-box activity types are set with expiration dates. For a list of out-of-the-box types and their settings, see Activity Types Included with InterAction.
Viewing and Changing the Expiration Date for an Activity
[A] When viewing an activity, the user can see the date on which the activity expires.
[B] When editing the activity, the user can change the expiration date by choosing a new timeframe.
The specific date is calculated based on the date for the activity. Normally this is the date the activity was created, but the user can change the date when creating or editing the activity.
Note that users can only change the expiration date if the activity type (Marketing Mailing in this example) is configured with the Allow users to override the default expiration days check box.
This section covers the following topics:
- Set the Expiration Options for an Activity Type
- What Happens to Existing Activities if I Change the Expiration Date for an Activity Type?
- Set up the Script to Delete Expired Activities
Set the Expiration Options for an Activity Type
When you create an activity type, you can select whether or not it expires and specify the timeframe. You can also specify whether or not end users can change the expiration timeframe for an individual activity.
- Edit the type as described in “Edit an Activity Type” in Creating and Editing Activity Types and Groups.
- Under Expiration, select or clear the Automatically delete activities of this type from InterAction check box.
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If you selected to automatically delete the activities, you must select a timeframe from the Delete activities of this type after drop-down list.
You can select one of the following timeframes:
- 2 weeks
- 30 days
- 60 days
- 90 days
- 180 days
- 1 year
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2 years
When a user creates an activity using the type, InterAction calculates the expiration date based on either the date the activity was created, or the date entered for the activity, whichever is later.
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If users should be allowed to change the expiration date, select the Allow users to override the default expiration days check box.
When this check box is selected, users can select a new time frame for an individual activity.
- Choose OK to save your changes.
- Choose the Close button to close the Manage Activity & Appointment Types dialog box.
What Happens to Existing Activities if I Change the Expiration Date for an Activity Type?
The action depends on whether or not the user chose to override the default expiration date for the existing activity.
If the User Did Not (or Could Not) Override the Default Expiration Date
In this case, the expiration date for the activity is automatically updated to reflect the new number of days before expiration. For example, assume that you created a new type called Presentation and set its expiration to 60 days. A user then creates an activity using this type. The activity was created on November 1 and is therefore set by default to expire on December 31.
You then edit the Presentation type in InterAction Administrator and change the expiration timeframe to 90 days. The existing activity will now expire on January 30.
If you change the activity to a shorter number of days, and the activity has already surpassed those number of days, then the activity will be purged at the next scheduled run of the data maintenance script. Assuming the same scenario as above, assume you changed the Presentation activity type timeframe from 60 days to 2 weeks. If two weeks have already passed since the activity was created, the activity is set to be deleted at the next scheduled run of the data maintenance script.
If the User Did Override the Default Expiration Date
The expiration date for the activity is not updated. For example, assume you have updated the Presentation activity type from 60 days to 120 days. An activity was already using that type and the user chose to override the expiration date so that the activity would never expire. After changing the Reminder activity type, the activity will still not expire. This prevents users from unexpectedly losing activities that they specifically wanted to keep in InterAction.
Set up the Script to Delete Expired Activities
Expired activities are automatically removed from the system by running the data maintenance script on a regular basis using the Process Manager. Note that you must set this up; if you never configure this script in Process Manager, then the “expired” activities in InterAction are never deleted.
For best results, set up Process Manager to run this script at least once a week during nights or weekends.
Note that this script does more than just purge expired activities. It also performs other cleanup procedures on your database in order to reduce its size and improve its performance.
- Log on to InterAction Administrator.
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From the main entity list in InterAction Administrator, double-click Processes - Schedule and Results.
You can schedule processes from any workstation with InterAction Administrator and the requested automated server process installed.
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On the Manage Process Schedule dialog box, choose New to open the New Scheduled Process dialog box.
- To set which workstation is used to run the process, choose Select, then enter the name of the computer or choose Browse to browse the network to find the computer. After selecting a workstation or server, choose OK.
- Select Run Database Script in the Processes drop-down list.
- Change the Process Name to reflect that this process is for running the data maintenance script.
- If you do not want the process to run yet, clear the Enabled check box. When a process is disabled, it is added to the schedule, but when Process Manager attempts to run it, it sees that the process is disabled and does not run it.
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Under Process Settings, choose Edit to open the Select Script to Run dialog box.
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On the Select Script to Run dialog box, choose the Browse button, browse for the INTIA_DATA_MAINT.SQL script and choose OK.
By default, this file is located in a subdirectory for your database in the following:
\Program Files\LexisNexis\InterAction\ServerProcesses\
- Choose OK to close the Select Script to Run dialog box.
- Under Schedule, choose Edit.
- Select the frequency with which you wish to run the process and choose OK.
- Enter the Task User and Send a Message information. For details, see the Administering InterAction guide.
- When finished, choose OK.