Manage work queues
The administrator's side of work queues: the Admin Queue view across every user and group, the expiration limits and hiding rules in System Settings, and the workflow triggers that watch queues so you don't have to.
At the end of this guide you can see every user's and group's queue in one view, unstick items that outlived their owner's attention, and set the guardrails — expiration limits, visibility rules, and the workflow automation that escalates aging items by itself.
One orientation fact first: work queues aren't objects you create or configure. Every user and group has one implicitly. "Managing work queues" means managing what's in them and the rules around them — which is why the pieces live in three places.
The Admin Queue: everything, everyone
On the Queues page, administrators see an Admin button (shield icon) — clicking it turns the Work tab into the Admin Queue: every queue item in the system, with the holding user or group in the Assigned By column's place. Access comes from the Allow Work-Queue Administration permission on document types (or full doc-type admin).
What you can do from here that owners can't:
- Remove from Queue on anyone's items — the unsticker for the ex-employee's queue, the abandoned pile, the mis-route. Removals land in each document's history ("Document removed from work queue of user '…'", noted as performed by an administrator).
- Set Expiration on selected items — impose an age-out on items sent without one.
- Export CSV — the queue census, for the meeting about why 400 invoices sit in one person's pile.
(Copy/Move to other queues is deliberately absent in admin mode — reassignment is the owner's move or a workflow's; the admin verbs are remove and expire.)
The guardrails: System Settings
Administration > System Settings > Work-Queue Settings:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Hide documents from Search & Catalog Browser when in a Work Queue | Queue items vanish from casual browsing until worked — the same trick approval routing offers |
| Limit expiration + Max Expiration / Max Expiration Interval | Caps how long any queue item can live. With the limit on, even "never expires" sends get clamped to the max |
Long-lived queues rot; a sensible max expiration is the difference between a queue and a landfill.
The automation: workflow watches the queues
Three trigger families under Administration > Workflow make queues self-tending — pair them with actions in a workflow rule:
- Work-Queue Age — "anything older than N days in the queue" → an E-mail action for escalation, the classic use.
- Work-Queue Arrival / Work-Queue Departure — react when items enter or leave, filtered to a catalog or document type.
- The Work Queue - Assign and Work Queue - Remove actions close the loop from the other side: rules that put documents into queues (with their own expiration) or pull them out, no human sender involved.
Success check: open the Admin Queue and sort by Date Received — the oldest item at the top tells you whether you need the escalation rule above, and now you know how to build it.