Retention and auditing

Retention policies

Each document in Viewpoint is subject to a defined retention policy, which dictates how long the document is stored. There are two types of retention policies:

• Direct: The retention period starts immediately upon document upload.
• On Signal: The retention period starts upon an external trigger by updating the RetentionStartDate.

Viewpoint automatically manages document lifecycle, deleting documents when their retention period expires while ensuring data remains recoverable during a configured grace period.

Reset RetentionStartDate

If the RetentionStartDate was set to a wrong value by mistake, you can reset it. Use the Patch endpoint to patch the RetentionStartDate to null. The retention period then does not start until the RetentionStartDate is set again.

Bypass Retention Policies

To bypass a retention policy, delete the document. It is deleted immediately, but it can still be recovered during the grace period.

Where you see retention in the web app

On Search, the RetentionPolicy and RetentionStartDate columns show each document’s policy and the date its retention period started. An empty RetentionStartDate on an On Signal document means the period has not started yet. See Search and view documents.

Auditing

All endpoints in the system are audited. The audit log contains information like the operation, client IP address, timestamp, client ID and more. Use the logs to analyse how the system is used. The logs are exported every night in the maintenance process and made available as zipped csv files to be used in tools like Excel and other tools for further analysis.

Opening the Viewpoint web app is recorded separately, in the Doxis Doc Gen audit log, as Access the ViewPoint application. See the Audit application.

Auditing of delete operation

When a document is deleted, the service can be configured to store selected metadata in the audit log. Since metadata schemas vary between customers, this configuration must be defined individually for each customer setup. Storing metadata in the audit log enables analysis and traceability of deleted documents, which is particularly important for documents using the retention type “On Signal”, where the retention start date is provided by an external system.

This will improve traceability and make it easier to understand the context and lifecycle of deleted documents across integrated systems.