Business Rules are a powerful and flexible way to automate the management of your content and metadata in Picturepark. With this release, we introduce schedules for Business Rules that enable you to trigger Business Rules at predefined date and time intervals. Previously, Business Rules could only be triggered by user activities such as a user importing or updating content.

Scheduled Business Rules open a new array of automation possibilities, for example:

• Informing teams, such as Sales, every Monday about new product literature.
• Hiding content that is nearing license expiry dates, and proactively informing the content owner.
• Publishing content to select stakeholders based on predefined schedules and other criteria.
• Archiving content by a predefined end-of-life date, e.g., your products.
• Tagging content “New” when it isn’t older than a few days, or as “For review” when it’s years old.
• Reminding content suppliers to complete their tagging if it wasn't done properly after import.
• Sorting out content that needs a check, e.g., when faces are detected without consent data.

To create a scheduled Business rule that, e.g., “locks” content on the day of expiry and informs the owner of the content, you need to do the following:

1. Create or reuse a Business rule that changes the content permission by adding a permission set that restricts access to content to certain users. Use “Schedule” as a trigger point.
2. Create or reuse a Notification based on an existing or new email template, informing the owner that the content has expired and was consequently locked, so he might want to check it manually.
3. Now, create a Schedule by defining the execution time intervals, a search string to query all content items that are expiring (based on a corresponding expiry date field), and assigning the Business Rule (from step one) to execute each time the interval occurs.
4. Test the Schedule by triggering it manually and applying it to a test Content Item only (e.g., by filtering for that item for testing purposes).

The above Schedule could also be used to trigger other Business Rules at the same interval. For instance, if the schedule is set to run every day at 7 AM CET and you also wish to release certain content by then, you can do so by assigning another Business Rule to the same Schedule.

Additional options and best practices for creating Schedules, Business Rules, and Notifications are available in the updated Administration Manual. Especially noteworthy are:

• The minimum accepted interval time is 15 minutes. The powerful cron job syntax is used for scheduling, e.g., to run jobs recurrently every hour, every Friday, the first day of the month, and more.
• Schedules are executed at an approximate time. If you set a schedule to 07.00 AM CET, it will be executed exactly at that time, but the Content Items might be offset depending on the defined search query, the number of Content Items to be processed, and the system's overall load.
• If processing of the items takes a long time and overlaps with the next interval, then the execution of that next interval will be skipped. For instance, if you are using 15-minute intervals and the processing takes 20 minutes, then the next execution will happen 30 minutes after the one that took longer. Filters should be used to narrow down Content Items to prevent overload and long processing times.

Unique IDs enable users and integrated systems to quickly identify a Content Item. Picturepark uses GUIDs, which are globally unique but therefore rather lengthy. For quick reference, a shorter number will usually be enough, which is why this release introduces new sequential numbers that can be created and applied using a Business Rule action. Applications include:

• Easier content referencing for users and machine processing.
• Counting new content and ranking it in the order it was added to Picturepark.
• Automatically generating new product or content codes, when creating a new item.

For creating a new sequential number that, for example, counts up content and makes it identifiable as “Picturepark” content, the following steps are required:

1. Create a new sequential number by defining the start number and format (for example,  “PP-” for Picturepark, used as a prefix).
2. Create or modify a Business Rule by adding the corresponding action to retrieve a new sequential number and then assign that number to a metadata field of a Layer.

Best practices for creating sequential numbers and Business Rules are available in the updated Administration Manual. Several small bug fixes were applied to improve usability. Especially noteworthy is that, for now, sequential numbers can only be assigned to Content Items (not, for example, to List Items).