Sharepoint 2010 - Item Scheduling

Item Scheduling - Wow i liked this feature

I am not sure if everybody is aware of this new feature in SharePoint 2010 . 

* What is Item Scheduling ? 

Ans : Item scheduling is a feature which helps to publish a document/page for a specified period. This feature is available out-of-the-box for publishing sites for the Pages library. It can also be implemented in a Team Site for custom document libraries.

Prerequisites for Item scheduling 

* You need to Enable content approval on the library

* You need to enable Versioning on the Document Library both for Major and Minor versions. 

* And the Most Important thing you need to have the publishing feature enabled on the site . 

You have this feature enabled on the document library . now after selecting the document you get an option that says Item Scheduling . In which you can specify the Date and time when you want to display the document to the Users and also the End date when you want to stop displaying the document to the Users .

The document would be published as a Major version for the Users in the List view  

Understanding why we need Versioning and Content approval

 When you upload the document in the library ,The first thing that happens is it will be added as a minor version (0.1).

 Once the user wants to display the document in the library to all users, They sent a request for the document to be published. This will trigger a workflow for approval to the members of the SharePoint Approval group.
Till that time the document is marked as Pending. 

When a Approver approves the document The minor version will be changed to a major version (1.0) and the status will be marked as approved.

Now if Managing Item Scheduling is enabled

If The document Scheduling Start Date is not Immediate and current date and time has not reached the specified date and time. The status will be marked as Scheduled and the version number will remain as minor (0.1). The Document will not be Displayed to the users in the list

The timer job that Runs at the back on the server is Scheduled Approval which Looks for content that is scheduled for approval and moves it to the next stage in the process.it runs every 1 minute by default. 

It automatically switches the Status to Approved and sets version to major and the Document is displayed to the user.

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.