Manage Item Scheduling

This feature on the Document Library Settings page will be seen only in document libraries on publishing-enabled sites, and is not available in SharePoint Foundation 2010. The tool will be available only if the list or library has major and minor versioning enabled, as well as content approval enabled. Assuming that the library meets these criteria, the Enable Scheduling of Items in This List option can be enabled from the Manage Item Scheduling page. Once enabled, any items that have content types that include start and end dates can be scheduled for publication.

Figure 20.17 shows the Properties window for a document that has just been uploaded to a document library that meets the criteria for scheduling. The content type of Page is selected, which includes a Scheduling Start Date and Scheduling End Date, as shown in Figure 20.17.

Figure 20.17. Entering scheduling start and end dates for a document.

Because content approval needs to be enabled, the document would need to be published to a major version and then approved by a user with Approve Items permissions in the library. Then, once the scheduling start date and time is reached, the item will be available for users who didn’t have the ability to see the draft version of the document to now see it and interact with it as their permissions allow.

Item scheduling is a fairly specialized tool, and because it has several dependencies that need to be configured for it to be available, as mentioned in this section, it is typically enabled only when there is a specific need to limit the timeframe during which the item is available.