Document Revision



When you create a new quality document, you can specify how frequently you want the document to be revised. When a certain document is up for review, the system sends the editorial committee a notification via email one month in advance, informing them about the upcoming revision date. The configuration for this process can be modified in the settings menu for approval processes – see chapter 7.2.

To review a document, you must access the workbook version of the document through the Documents interface of the Quality Manual. You find the document in question, set it to edit mode (or “check it out”), and change the status from Complete to In progress. In doing so, all previous approvals of the document are deleted. The revision of documents can be done at any time, not exclusively on some predetermined time interval.

While in the revision process, a published document remains unaltered in the Published documents list. Changing the status of the workbook copy of the document to In progress has no effect on the already published document. The contents of the document are reviewed and updated if necessary, the status is changed to Complete and the approval process starts all over again. When the document has been approved, it’s again published and one digit is added to its version number in the Published documents list.


Deleting documents

If the intention is not to republish a document after revision because it’s become outdated or irrelevant, you always have the option of deleting it. A document can be deleted by clicking the waste bin icon on the right-hand side of it in the document list. On the other hand, if you want to delete several documents at the same time, you can mark their checkboxes, click Actions and Delete them there. Everybody that has access to the workbook can delete documents that nobody is working on, or documents that they have checked out themselves. Note that you only have the choice of deleting documents in the Documents interface. You have no such option when you’re viewing the list of Published documents.

If you accidentally delete a document, there’s no need to panic as deleted documents get sent to the Recycle bin, where you can restore them. The document will then be accessible again in its original location and available for editing. You can access the Recycle bin simply by clicking the corresponding option under your username on the CCQ banner up top. If you’re absolutely positive you won’t be needing the deleted document ever again, you can permanently delete it from the system. After that, it’s gone forever. As a rule of thumb, you should avoid permanently deleting documents without very good reason. You never know when you might need to review them.


Obsolete documents

As has been stated, a deleted document gets sent to the Recycle bin. Moreover, if older versions of the document exist, they get stored under a view called Obsolete documents when it gets deleted. If the deleted document is subsequently restored, its obsolete documents are also restored back to the Older versions view. The idea here is to ensure the traceability of documents even when they get deleted. To find obsolete documents in the system, you have a filter for that purpose in the drop-down list at the top of the Documents interface. This was discussed in more detail in section 2.1.13. Note that when a document gets permanently deleted, the corresponding older, obsolete documents get permanently deleted as well.