Control when a document is displayed: Managing Item Scheduling

You may not know this already but SharePoint has this cool feature called Managing Item Scheduling.  Have you ever wanted to upload a file to a library but only have it display between certain dates even times to all users?  Well SharePoint has the answer for your dilemma.

First, here are prerequisites to use this functionality:

1. Content Approval needs to be enabled on the library.
2. Versioning needs to be enabled both for Major and Minor versions.
3. And the real kicker, must use a library within a Publishing site, which means you need MOSS 2007 to utilize this functionality.

 So what exactly does Managing Item Scheduling do?  Let say you have this feature enabled.  When you upload a file to the document library, when entering the properties in the EditForm.aspx page, you will notice 2 new columns: Scheduling Start Date and Scheduling End Date.

When you define the Scheduling Start Date this says when the Published major version of the document will be displayed to the end user in the List View.  The options are fairly self explanatory.  The Scheduling End Date options define when the Publish major version of the document should no longer be displayed in the list views, again the options are self explanatory. 

Now the next parts is where the Versioning and Content Approval comes into play.  When you save the document, initially it is marked as minor version (0.1).  Once the user is ready for it to be displayed in the library to all users, they must submit a request for the document to be published.  This will send the document through a workflow to a set of users who are a member of the SharePoint Approval group.  You will notice that the status of the document is marked as Pending.  When a users that is a member of the Approval group marks the document as Approved, commonly 2 steps will occur to the minor version of the document sent for approval:

1. The minor version will be changed to a major version (1.0), and,
2. The status will be marked as approved.

The above is what happens in a traditional document library with Versions and Content Approval enabled.  Now if Managing Item Scheduling is enabled, couple variants are put in place.  If the document's Scheduling Start Date is not Immediately and current date and time has not reached the specified date and time, the following occurs to the item:

1. The status will be marked as Scheduled, and,
2. The version number will remain as minor (i.e. 0.1)

As a resulting not displaying to end users in list view Web Parts.  SharePoint has a timer job that monitors in the background items that has status of Scheduled and when the Scheduling Start Date matches the current date and time, it automatically switches Status to Approved and sets version to major release, thus making the file viewable.

If there is a specified Scheduling End Date then once the current date and time is greater, the status is marked as Scheduled and the version number is set back to highest minor release version of the previous major release.

Cool stuff eh?

So now I told you HOW this cool feature works, lets talk about how to activate it.  As I mentioned, one of the prerequisites is a Publishing Site.  Microsoft was kind enough to enable this feature automatically in the Documents library of the Publishing Site with Workflow site template.  But if you want to create either a new Document Library in this site or another Publishing site, the following steps will need to occur:

1. After creating a new Document Library go to List Settings.
2. In section General Settings select the link Versioning Settings, and enable:
   1. Content Approval to Yes.
   2. Document Version History to Create major and minor (draft) versions.
3. In section General Settings select the link Manage Item Scheduling and select the option Enable scheduling of items in this list. yes for some reason when you click OK it sends you to Site Settings for some odd reason, gotta keep you on your toes some how I guess.
4. So back to List Settings of the document library, in the section Columns select the link Add from existing Site Columns (if you are using Content Types you can perform this step in the Site Content Type also).
5. Filter the list of Available Site Columns by selecting the group Publishing Columns in the drop down menu.  Select Scheduling Start Time and Scheduling End Time to the Columns to Add list box and click OK.

You have now successfully configured your library to handle item scheduling.