Page History

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• Our database has approximately 141k documents which were last modified between 2009 and 2025.
  (If no later modification occurred, the creation time of a document is the last modification time)
  
  
• We set a retention policy of 4 years (starting at the current date), for which documents have to be retained
  
  
• That results in a retention cutoff date of September 23, 2021 (assuming the current date is September 23, 2025)
  
  
  
• Looking at that history, iDNA summarizes that approximately 115k of documents (~82%) are still with within the retention period
  
  
  
• Organizations benefit immediately by understanding which databases are ready for archiving immediately. Applications where most documents are nearing the end of their retention period—even if not all are—may be suitable for read-only mode, ensuring no new edits "reset" the earliest archiving date
  
  On the flip side, an organization can gain insights quickly and transparently as to which applications are still active elements in their business processes from the content angle, rather than iDNA's usual user activity recording. This provides great value in scenarios where iDNA has been running for a shorter period of time and no extensive usage history is available. It also shows which applications may be a challenge when considering migration scenarios. Re-developing an existing application in a new target system is one thing; making sure a decade's worth of data is migrated flawlessly is quite another. The data must not only be accessible within the application but must also be available to other components of the business process without any loss.

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• License: Content Age data collection will only be performed if a valid license is found that includes the Content Age module.
  
  
• Initial Collection: After the new license is applied, the initial content age collection will occur. We recommend restarting iDNA immediately after the license upload is uploaded using the command "ifa restart" via Putty.
  Note: databases that are in FAILED/CRASHED state due to previous collection errors will not be re-scanned at this time. A scan for those DBs must be performed manually (see bullet point "(Re-)Collection" below)
  
  
• Default Schedule: The collection is linked to the design analysis process. As such, normal scanning will adhere to its defined schedule as well. The default and recommended setting for design updates is "Weekly, on Saturday", but may be different in your installation. Please check the menu item [Settings] → [Database design re-scan options] for details. No automatic collection will happen before the scheduled time.
  
  
• Schedule Customization: iDNA avoids accessing individual non-system DBs on a regular basis. That is why DB design is set by default to be re-scanned on weekends and then only changed since the last scan. Since this Content Age collection would connect to each Focus DB every week, we added a config parameter that allows specifying an interval in weeks that should pass between scans.
  
  For example: setting the ETL parameter "ia_profile_rescan_interval_weeks" to "2" will basically mean "Only scan every second week on Saturday". ETL parameters can be configured in the admin interface ([Settings] → [System configuration...]) in the menu item [Advanced Settings] → [ETL] → [ETL Properties] (see paragraph "Setting up Periodic Collection" in our Profile Documents Configuration knowledge base article for more details).
  
  
  
  
• (Re-)Collection can be triggered manually for one or more databases via the menu item [Settings] → [Design analysis status]. Note: if code analysis is licensed, using this option will also trigger a re-collection and re-processing of design data. This may take several days, depending on the number of databases to process. The regular scheduled scan on Saturday will only re-collect design data if changes in DB design occurred.
  
  
  
  
• DB Scope: Content Age information will be collected from all Focus DBs (database categories "Application" and "Mail-in DB"), excluding files with the NTF extension.
  
  
• Processing: Before collected data is visible in iDNA's user interface, it needs to be processed by the nightly data warehouse update.

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• Retention Years (mandatory): specifies how many years the data will be retained
• Retention Mode (mandatory): defines how the retention start date is determined 
• Retention Manager (optional): the person responsible for determining the appropriate Retention Configuration

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Application Details

A new tab, "Content Age" is available in Application Details for databases where content age data was collected.

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