Archiving in PolicyCenter

Archiving is the process of moving the data associated with a policy from the active PolicyCenter database to a document storage area. In PolicyCenter, you archive a policy term. In turn, PolicyCenter archives the data associated with all policy periods in that policy term. You can search for archived policy terms and then request that PolicyCenter retrieve and restore an archived policy term from the archive. While archived, the data associated with the policy term occupies less space in the active database.

Key features

Policy term archiving in PolicyCenter has the following characteristics:

  • PolicyCenter only archives policy terms that have been expired for a specified number of days. You specify the number of days in a configuration parameter.
  • A batch processes identifies policy terms that need archiving, and then archives them.
  • The archive batch process may skip or exclude some policy terms under the following conditions:
    • The policy terms are still associated with other active objects, such as open policy transactions, or jobs
    • The policy terms were recently retrieved from the archive
    • A user requested that a policy be excluded from archiving
  • In PolicyCenter, you can search for archived policies on the screen that you search for policies. For both active and archived policies, the PolicyPeriod object is the basis of the search.
  • You can choose to search for archived policies and related entities. However, such searches depend on fields present in the active database. Therefore, some search fields, such as those on most effective-dated entities, are inappropriate when searching and including archived terms.

    The policy search results display the same policy summary information whether the policy is active or archived. Archived policies appear but are not selectable.

    You can configure policy search to use Policy, PolicyTerm, PolicyPeriod, or even deeper objects as the basis of the search.

  • A user can request that PolicyCenter retrieve an archived policy at any time. A batch process retrieves the policy, restores it to the PolicyCenter database, and sends an activity to the user.
  • The retrieved policy is identical to a policy that has never undergone the archiving process.