The SharePoint Content Organizer Timer Job

So, you’ve setup your content organizer with the appropriate rules and they are working. – check.

You’ve added the appropriate users to the “Rule Managers” group so they will be reminded via email whenever the content organizer starts filling up. – check

imageYou’ve configured the Content Organizer Settings to set the limit so that document metadata has to be filled out after no more than 3 days. – check.

But you’re concerned that the timer job may need to run more often than the default setting of once per day because that may not be frequently enough to keep things running smoothly.  You say to yourself, “Why not run this every hour or so?  What could it hurt?”

Content Organizer EmailWell, one problem is that whenever the “Content Organizer Processing” timer job runs, if it finds that the drop off library is filling up, it will fire off that reminder email EVERY TIME it runs.

Just for fun, let’s set it to run every 15 minutes.  Once it detects that there are documents in the drop-off library that have been there longer than the time you have specified in the Content Organizer Settings, it will start notifying the Rule Managers group members.

Content Organizer EmailsIf the content owners have not yet gotten around to fixing the metadata for the documents that are waiting to be processed, they will now get an annoying reminder email every 15 minutes.

This will be true if there are ANY documents left in the drop-off library.

Keep this in mind when you are configuring the Content Organizer Processing job settings.  It turns out that the “once per day” setting seems like a reasonable default.  If you want the rules to process more often, then you’ll have to balance the timer job frequency against the need for the content owners to be notified, and also against the probability of having misconfigured rules or (more likely) missing document metadata.

But wait!  There’s more!

Let’s say you’ve turned on the email notifications by clicking the checkboxes, just to see if everything works.  Now you want to turn it off.  So you go into the Content Organizer Settings page and uncheck both the “E-mail rule managers…” checkboxes, expecting that the emails will stop immediately.  Au Contraire!  The email messages continue firing with the same frequency as before.

So how do you get them to stop?  For that, you’ll have to recycle the OWS timer so that it reloads the new timer job settings.

-jfh

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