Retention policy and recurrence

Question

I'd like to set up a retention policy in a document library so that the editor of a document recieves an e-mail when the document was not modified within the last year. Then the editor of the document should recieve an e-mail every 7 days as a reminder so that he/she is "forced" to update the document or delete it, if it's outdated.

I've configured a policy like this:
  Event: Modified + 12 months
  Action: Start a workflow (sends an e-mail to the last editor)
  Recurrence: Every 7 days

The timer jobs for the retention are configured like this:
  Information management policy: weekly; friday 11pm
  Expiration policy: weekly; saturday 11pm

I've received e-mails for the "initial" event (modified + 12 months), but I do not receive the weekly "follow up" e-mails.

Any ideas why recurrence / series is not working?

Answer 1

When you're using the action "Start a workflow" the workflow is linked to the policy.

During the testing period I had to make changes to the workflow and published a new version of the workflow to the document library. But the policy was still linked to the initial version of the workflow (which had an error so that no e-mails had been sent).

In my case I've even deleted the old version of the workflow (resulting in the error "Invalid retention stage defined.)":

So everytime you publish a new version of a workflow for a retention policy, be sure to update your policy action of your document library as well.

This great article points out the nasty details of recurrence in SharePoint's information policy and helped me to redesign the retention policy from scratch.