About Content Lifecycles

Control over maturity is essential to managing regulated documents such as for chemistry manufacturing and controls (CMC) and good manufacturing practice (GMP) purposes. All Structured Document Editor objects have an associated maturity state at all times. Defined lifecycles manage transfers between maturity states.

This page discusses:

See Also
Structured Document Management Access to Content
Managing Content Lifecycles

Source Object Lifecycle

The maturity states managed by the lifecycle for source objects (such as, document maps, topics, images, data frames, or image frames) are:

You can only delete source objects in the In Work maturity state.

Published Document Lifecycle

The maturity states managed by the lifecycle for published documents are:

You can only delete published documents in the Private maturity state.

Revisions

You can create new revisions of source objects in the Released or Obsolete maturity states so long as no other revisions in the In Work or Frozen maturity states. New revisions are always created in the In Work maturity state.

Creating a new revision generates a new source object containing an exact copy of the latest revision. If you create a revision of a topic containing cross-references, the new revision's references remain valid.

All references to the preceding revision remain valid. References are not updated to take into account the new revision. If you want to reference the new revision, you must update the references in your map (to a topic) or topic (to a content reference or image).

When you release a new revision, the previous revision becomes obsolete.