We would like to make customers aware of a bug that has been identified in Mosaic relating to case retention and deletion.
If you update the retention period for a specific criteria, this will only impact retentions added or edited after the change.
This functionality is working as designed, but customers should be aware of this in cases where the retention period should change for all historic cases too.
What does this mean for you?
For example, if you had:
Criteria: Cases closed after investigation - Retention period: 1 year, and you added this retention criteria on Persons A-G, if you then changed the retention period (via Admin Tool) for cases closed after investigation to 2 years, any new cases added would calculate a retention period of 2 years.
Persons A-G however would still have a retention period of 1 year, despite having the same criteria, as the period remains as it was when the criteria was added.
Although the retention period on historic cases will remain the same (in the tables, on the widget on the front screen, and when identified by the bulk delete functionality), we’ve noticed that if you access the File Retention screen from the File Management menu (on the Person Summary side menu), the retention date is calculated using the new retention criteria.
For example:
Person A has the retention period added for cases closed after investigation while it is set to 1 year. The start date is input as 01/01/2022, so the retention end date is 01/01/2023.
The cases closed after investigation is then updated to 2 years.
Person A’s retention end date is still 01/01/2023. This is recorded in the database tables and shown on the retention widget (via Person Summary) and is the date that would be used when looking for cases eligible for deletion in the Bulk Deletion screen – or via any reports.
However, as mentioned, if you access the File Retention screen, from the File Management menu (on the Person Summary side menu), the retention end date here is calculated using the current retention period for that category - e.g. 2 years. This doesn’t automatically make any changes to the record, but here it will show a retention end date of 01/01/2024 (for this example).
If you were to edit the file retention criteria on this record or chose to 'save' on this screen at this point, even without making any other amendments, this end date would then be updated on this specific case. The retention end date would then be fully updated to 01/01/2024.
If you simply cancel out of the screen however, the end date will remain on the case as it was - 01/01/2023, despite showing as 01/01/2024 in the retention screen.
Next steps
We recognise this bug, however rather than simply 'fix' this, i.e. make the retention screen show the date that is recorded on the case, we intend to change the functionality itself. We will look to change this so that when any retention period is updated, all cases using that retention criteria would update the period automatically.
If there are retention periods that should not change historically, then these can be added as a new retention criteria type, and the old one can be ended so it’s no longer used on old cases.
This then covers both scenarios - those where the criteria changes are required for all cases, including historic ones, and those where changes are required for cases from a specific point onwards.
We will work on the specifications for this change and hope to include this in a future release.
In the meantime, we recommend that you familiarise yourselves with this issue and consider the possible impact on file retention and deletion. This will only impact customers who have made a change to the retention time period for existing retention criteria, but it could result in cases being deleted earlier or later than they should be.
Given this, we would recommend extracting the data (via Reports or the Bulk Deletion screen), filtering out those with the affected criteria and using this to inform correct selection for deletion.
📌Note: A fix has been rolled out in Mosaic 24.1. If you have any further questions about this, please raise a new case on the Customer Success Portal.