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Introduction

In document lifecycle management, multi-stage and asynchronous processes are not uncommon—quite the contrary. The first process steps are carried out with the highest priority. More complex and currently not absolutely essential process steps are carried out asynchronously with a lower priority. This saves time, and carrying out operations in parallel lets you distribute resources more evenly. To resume a process chain, additional information about the current status of the process is necessary. In order to not mix an object's metadata with its status data, there is the possibility to tag objects. 

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• Tags describe the status of an object in a process chain.
• Tags can be added to any object. They are stored together with the object.
• Multiple tags can be added to one object. The number of tags assigned to one object is limited to 50.
• The tags specify the status information via an integer value. Additionally, tags have a unique process number that can be set during the tag creation or will be randomly set after any tag operation.
• Any tag operation is documented in the object audit trail.
• Tags do not belong to the metadata and thus do not need to be defined in the schema. Moreover, tag operations do not lead to the creation of a new object version.
• Tags are always available for the current object version.
• The properties of tags are included in the searchable data.

The special feature of tags is the independence of versioning and schema definitions. The tags of an object are always attached to the current version, whereas previous versions cannot have tags. For version-specific information, metadata provide the suitable options. They have to be defined in the Schema.

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