Storage Solution FAQ
Mercury has implemented a new storage solution in response to developments regarding Microsoft’s Dataverse database storage approach. The new storage solution is designed to copy closed activities from Dataverse to a Microsoft Azure Cosmos database and then after a retention period, remove the activities from Dataverse leaving them in Cosmos. The closed archived activity in Cosmos is subsequently still viewed within Mercury by users via a virtual entity for ‘Archived Activities’
The new Archived Activities can be seen on the left menu:
It can also be accessed from the main entities e.g. Contact, Client, Vacancy, Placement etc.
The archived activity record when opened still has the same look and feel as the original Dataverse record:
What activities are currently included*?
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Appointments
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Emails
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Phone Calls
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Shortlist Updates
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Updates
*Further activities will be added in further updates to storage
When do current Dataverse timeline activities move to archived activities?
At the point the activity is closed, it will be copied to the archived activities entity and will appear in the archived activities timeline. It will however still remain on the Dataverse timeline for the number of days set in the retention period and will only be deleted from the Dataverse timeline once the retention period is reached. If an activity is set as closed at the initial point of creating and saving, it will be written to both Dataverse and archived activities timeline. Everything will always still be written to Dataverse in the first instance, even if being created as a closed activity.Retention Period
The retention period can be set by you and relates to how long the activities remain on the Dataverse timeline once they have been closed before deletion. For example, if emails are set to 30 days, the system will delete them from the Dataverse timeline 30 days after they were closed.As standard, we default to 60 which will result in all closed activities being deleted from Dataverse after 60 days.
However, it’s also possible to specify a value for each activity type e.g. keep appointments for 14 days, phone calls for 30 days and emails for 60 days.
Dataverse Initial Bulk Migrate
When we first onboard you to the new storage solution, each activity you have in Dataverse that is closed will be copied to archived activities. During this copy process, the system looks at the retention value for the specific activity type and based on the retention value, calculates the date to be deleted.
Dataverse Bulk Deletions
A reoccurring bulk job will run once a week to delete records based on the DeleteOn value.Example – a closed phone call activity is copied to archived activities on Monday 1st November. The retention for a phone call has been set at 14 days. The DeleteOn field will be populated with Monday 15th November.
The bulk job runs at 2am every 7 days (the run day will vary based on when it was created) but as an example it runs every Wednesday at 2am, so in this example, the phone call would be deleted on Wednesday 17th November at 2am.
Known current limitations to Archived Activities timeline / grid view
- Unable to reply to closed emails (set retention to suitable period you would typically expect to be replying in)
Further data
In addition to the aforementioned activities, we also plan to add the following data entities into Cosmos in the near future as they are also large consumers of Dataverse data:
- Skill Levels
- Education
- Work History