In UCM, you are allowed to store an unlimited amount of contracts! While this may sound great, it could also lead to your Searches and Views being bogged down by expired or terminated Contracts. To help combat that, you have to ability to Archive your Contracts in UCM. Archiving will in essence "hide" those Contracts from your daily system usage, while preserving all the data stored in the Container for historical records.
Archiving from a Contract
While Archiving is handled from the Workflow section of a Contract, the administrative configuration for Archiving is directly linked to the individual Stage (more information HERE), Archiving is NOT a Stage in UCM (more information on that can be found HERE).
To Archive an Agreement, first go to the Contract Container and select the Workflow dropdown (1). If the Stage that the Contract is currently in is one that your Administrators configured to allow archiving from, then the final selection in the menu will be Archive Agreement (2). If you do not see Archive Agreement, then the Stage you are currently in is NOT allowed to be Archived from. Usually though, the final Stages of your Workflow, like Expired or Terminated will have it configured.
After you click to Archive the Agreement, you'll get a pop-up asking if you'd like to mark all outstanding Milestones and Alerts as complete. Generally speaking, you'll almost always want to select YES, since you would not want anyone to receive notifications for an Archived Contract.
You'll then be asked to leave a Note as to why the Contract is being Archived. The Note will be stored under the Note Tab of the Container.
After you Archive you'll be taken to your default Contract View and receive a green confirmation banner that the Contract was Updated Successfully.
Accessing Archived Contracts
To access your Archived Contracts, all you need to do is make sure the Include Archived checkbox is marked on your Global Searches (A) and when creating or editing Views (B).
If these boxes are not checked, then all your Archived contracts will stay "hidden" when you either search or run your View.
One inside the Container, you'll see a red circle with an A inside, which will let you know the Contract is Archived.
Also notice how the Stage is still Expired, which is the Stage it was in when we Archived. That is because Archiving is not a Stage itself, and by keeping it in the same Stage, it is easier to identify where the Contract was in it's Workflow when it was Archived.
To learn how to Unarchive a Contract, click HERE.