Closing Vs Locking & their automation
Hi all, what do you usually suggest to clients as last step of a budget/forecasting cycle, to Close the workflow hierarchy or to Lock its workflows? I am just checking if there is any disadvantage by using one against the other.
Also, is there a way of automating the closing/locking so that it is trigger on a certain date? I was thinking I can may create a rule encapsulated in a data management job and schedule that, but is there an easier way? Thank you
Closing Workflows is not recommended anymore. It does some "optimizations" behind the scenes, severing ties from the original sources of data and reshaping records in a data-warehouse-oriented fashion; which means that data retrieval becomes slower, some drilldowns stop working, and reopening the workflows later on might create problems. It's a feature we recommend only when you're 200% certain that the data will never, ever, be modified again, and you are ok with paying a performance penalty to retrieve it (think "Amazon Glacier", or tape backups).
As for automating locking - apart from the Lock After Certify option in Application Properties, I'm not aware of any feature to do that automatically. A rule from a DM job sounds like a good way to go.
