When publishing content to the Live publication on the Portal, the user may select any effective date, whether in the future or the past. In certain scenarios, later versions of the selected content may already exist, and as part of the publishing process, these versions may be replaced.

Publishing with Past and Future Effective Dates

When the user chooses to publish either the entire Collection or selected documents and files with an effective date set in the past or future, the CCMS evaluates each item to determine whether any versions exist that are dated later than the selected effective date. If a document or file has one or more later dated versions, an alert is displayed on both the Select Content page and the Review Content page to highlight this.

Select Content

A general alert is displayed at the top of the page to inform users that the Collection contains documents or files with later dated versions and therefore may be replaced if selected. In addition, an alert indicator is shown beside each individual document or file that has one or more later dated versions. When the user hovers over the alert, a tooltip provides further detail, indicating that later dated versions exist.

Review Content

When reviewing the selected content, whether for a partial publish or a full Collection publish, the Review Content page displays both the general alert indicating the presence of later‑dated versions and the individual alerts shown beside each document or file that has one or more later versions.

Publish with Replaced Versions

On proceeding to publish documents or files that have later versions, a modal will be displayed further warning the user that versions of the selected documents and files may be replaced. 

On proceeding with the publish, the Manage Releases page for a full Collection publish will mark the publish as “Archived”.

Replaced Versions in the Portal

When one or more versions of a document or file are replaced in the Portal, the version timeline for that item is updated to remove the replaced versions. Any associated content alerts on the Subscriptions Dashboard, as well as entries on the Publications & Announcements dashboard that relate to those replaced versions, are also removed.

In scenarios where the first published version of a document or file is replaced, the item is removed from the Portal publication until it is published again. Replaced versions cannot be reinstated.

As versions on Draft Publications are not associated with an effective date, the replacement functionality does not apply to Publication Flows that update the Draft Publication on the Portal.