This guide explains how to use the Retention Manager Lite features available in ERM, also known as document retention maintenance tasks. It covers the related parts of the feature: the Document Destruction page, and the Exceptions File Review page.
What Retention Manager Lite does
Retention Manager Lite helps your team manage employee documents through a controlled, routine lifecycle instead of deleting files immediately and permanently.
Retention task: identifies documents whose retention period has expired and soft-deletes them into a recycle/destruction state.
Destruction approval: lets authorized users review those soft-deleted documents and approve them for permanent deletion.
Purge task: permanently deletes approved documents and logs each revision-level purge attempt.
Note: Retention does not immediately destroy documents. Documents are soft-deleted, manually reviewed and approved, and then permanently purged by an automated process.
Before you begin
You need the appropriate role permissions to access the Document Destruction page and/or the Exceptions File Review page.
You should understand which employee date will trigger retention, such as a termination date.
You should understand whether any document-level date should extend retention, such as a document upload date or other retention start field.
How Retention Manager Lite works
The Retention Manager Lite features are configured as Maintenance Tasks via the Customers module.
Maintenance tasks in a database are automated processes aimed at keeping the database operational, protected, and performing efficiently. These kinds of tasks may typically include data integrity checks, index management, updating statistics, and regular backups to prevent data corruption and optimize performance.
The following maintenance tasks are configurable in Employee Records Management (ERM):
Maintenance Task | Description |
|---|---|
Migrate Employee Folders | Moves documents from legacy VisualVault employee folders into ERM-managed employee folders, with optional cleanup of emptied legacy folders. |
Document Retention | Soft-deletes employee documents whose retention period has expired (based on the configured retention start date and employee trigger date). Deleted documents go to the Document Destruction Approval list. |
Document Purge | Permanently purges documents that have been approved for destruction on the Document Destruction Approval page. Purges every revision of each approved document. |
VisualVault implementers configure the maintenance task and monitor logging; meanwhile customers can review and approve document destruction and exceptions.
Comparing Retention Manager Lite capabilities
Capability | Document Library (folder-based record retention) | Retention Manager Lite (within ERM) | Advanced Retention Manager |
|---|---|---|---|
Timed retention rules | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Configurable expiration action (nothing, archive, or delete) | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Self-service configuration | ✔ | - | ✔ |
Pending destruction queue | - | ✔ | ✔ |
Human decision, manual approval before document purge | - | ✔ | ✔ |
Search and export (CSV) | - | ✔ | ✔ |
Retention policy works across multiple databases | - | - | ✔ |
Custom document-matching rules (metadata-based) | - | - | ✔ |
Configurable approval workflow (groups, min. approvals) | - | - | ✔ |
Legal hold | - | - | ✔ |
Automatic handling of overlapping policies | - | - | ✔ |
Coverage gap detection | - | - | ✔ |
History of every administrative action | - | - | ✔ |
API access for multiple VisualVault products | - | - | ✔ |