Document Statuses and the Document Lifecycle

Why status matters

Every StretchDocs document is always in exactly one of four statuses. Status is not decoration — it drives your dashboard counts, powers library filters, and tells everyone whether a document can be trusted. Treating status as a discipline is the single biggest difference between an organized document estate and a pile of files.

The four statuses

• Draft — a work in progress. New documents start here. Drafts are visible to your team but shouldn't be treated as authoritative.
• Review — ready for feedback. Use this while reviewers leave comments and suggestions. It signals "look at this, but don't rely on it yet."
• Published — approved and authoritative. Published is your source of truth. If someone follows a Published SOP, they should be able to trust it.
• Archived — retired. The document is preserved but removed from active lists. Archiving is how StretchDocs "deletes" — it is always reversible.

The typical lifecycle

1. Create a document → it starts as Draft.
2. Write until the content is substantially complete.
3. Move to Review and gather comments and suggestions from stakeholders.
4. Resolve feedback, then set to Published.
5. When the document is superseded or no longer relevant, set to Archived.
6. If it's needed again, reopen it and set it back to Draft or Published.

Change a status

1. Open the document.
2. Open the status control in the document header.
3. Choose the new status and confirm.
4. The change is saved immediately and the document's updated timestamp refreshes.

StretchDocs only accepts the four valid statuses; anything unrecognized falls back to the document's current value, so you can't accidentally put a document into an invalid state.

Status on the dashboard

The overview dashboard breaks your library down by status — specifically draft count and published count alongside your total document count. This gives leadership a fast read: a healthy operations library, for instance, should be mostly Published with a small, moving population of Drafts and Reviews. A large and growing Draft count is a signal that work is starting but not finishing.

A realistic example

A compliance manager audits the company handbook. She filters the library to status = Published and finds a policy that's out of date. She sets it to Draft, updates the language, moves it to Review, and routes it to Legal, who leave two suggestions. She accepts both and sets it back to Published. The old version still exists in version history, and the dashboard's published count is unchanged — but the content is now current.

Tips

• Don't let documents live in Review forever — Review means "a decision is pending."
• Reserve Published for content people are meant to rely on. If it's aspirational or unfinished, keep it in Draft.
• Archive aggressively. Retired-but-preserved beats a cluttered Published list.
• Use status filters in the library to run quick governance passes ("show me everything still in Draft older than a month").

FAQ

Is Archived the same as deleted? Functionally, yes — archiving is how the workspace removes a document from active use, and a delete action archives rather than destroys. The content and its history remain and can be restored.

Can I skip Review and publish directly? Yes. Review is a workflow convenience, not a hard gate. For low-stakes documents you can move Draft → Published directly.

Does changing status change the version? Status is metadata. Changing it updates the document record and timestamp but is separate from content versioning.