Guidelines on archiving a fact sheets for sunset applications

This is a tricky topic, that needs to balance your desire to keep and report on history versus your subscription limit (the number of Applications you can store).

I keep End of life applications for 13 months before archiving.

I only archive applications if they turn out to be duplicates or if they are incorrect for some other reason like they should have been an IT component instead of an app.

In all other situations, I keep an application even after the EoL date, so that I can easily go back in time whenever a question about the past system landscape comes up. I have already seen questions like „we have this legal issue that goes back to the 1990s and we need to find out what applications we were running and who was responsible“, and it saves a lot of time to have the right subscriptions and successor applications documented in leanix.

If the capability of „easily going back in time“ becomes unjustifiably expensive, I guess I would define a threshold like „x years“, but I would still keep the data in my automated snapshots so that I can still try to retrieve the information with a bit of effort.

Typically what I have seen is others will have them in no longer than 90 days. This, of course depends on your use case. You can create a successor/predecessor roadmap and download that which you can keep for records. As Stephen mentioned if you need to report on them then keep longer.

This could be a good use case for automation, to auto archive the application fact sheet after a configurated number of days post Lifecycle state change to EOL.

Hello,

I remove applications which are older than 10 years, sometimes earlier, if they are very specialized and have a small user group. Before I save them to an Internal SP List by using an excel export.