If a document is no longer relevant to your company, it is best to retire the document. This will remove visibility of the document in the Library, without removing the document from Qualio. Retired documents can be accessed from the Retired view in the Workspace and will be retained in Qualio for the life of a customer contract.
How to Retire a Document
Quality users can retire any effective document by first browsing to the Document Workspace. Select All Documents and Effective filters. Then check the box next to the document to be retired and click the Retire button. Users will need to enter their digital signature as the final step.
The document will not be deleted, but moved to the Retired view. The action will be recorded in the Audit Trail.
Access and Restore Retired Documents
Retired documents can always be accessed from the Document Workspace by filtering for All Documents in a Retired status. The document can be opened and viewed, and when necessary, a new draft can be created of that document.
If another document has a smartlink to the now-retired document, Quality users will be directed to the retired document, but Basic and Normal users will receive an error message due to not having access to view retired documents.
How to Retire a Document using Change Request
Using the Document Change Request is helpful for users who want to document the reason for the retirement so there is traceability as to the reason it was retired.
Quality users can retire can only retire that document via the change request by fully up versioning or else that draft document will be unlinked from the DCR. If version 2.0 is added to the DCR, moves to draft, it must be approved and moved to version 3.0 before it can be retired.
Navigate to Library > click "Change requests" > click "Create new".
Complete the fields, click "Search documents to add", and add the documents to be retired.
Click "Search approvers to add", and add the owner and QA for the document as approvers, then click "Send for approval".
Owners and QA approve the change request.
You can then click into the document(s).
Add the CC- details and click "Send for approval". The DCR will be linked in the properties section.
Once approved, click "Retire".
Once retired, the DCR will always show up in the properties of the retired document so that there is traceability as to why it was retired.
You will then need to go into the change request and close it out.
Click "Close change request".
Next Step
Retiring a document is the final stage of the document lifecycle. To review the entire document lifecycle process click the button below.