Holds are a significant business event.  Toward that end HP TRIM maintains a separate business object for them, allowing you to create holds, describe them and associate them to records.  As with all other objects in HP TRIM you can create and assign as many metadata fields to holds as you wish.

By default each holds is created with a descriptive title, additional notes (this can have thousands of characters if you like), a start date, a close date, contact details, and a check box to "only prevent disposition changes".  This check box has been implemented to accommodate a request from customers who wanted to use the hold functionality to suspend the disposal process only, not the modification of the records or their metadata. This is used as part of their internal auditing and review processes, not for legal holds, where you want to prevent any modification of data, except for the tracking and auditing of access and movements of the records.

Once you have created the hold object you can then associate it with individual or groups of selected records and documents. Each hold can be associated with many records and documents and every record or document can be associated with many holds.  Only once all holds have been released from a record or document can you start updating or disposing of it again.

The assignment and removal of holds is logged in the audit trail including the descriptive name of the hold, so that at any time you can see the hold activity for any record.or document. The removal of a hold from an item is only one way to release it; the other way is to declare the hold as closed by entering a close date.  As soon as the close date of a hold is in the past, all records and documents in the hold are released, even though the association between the objects still exists. This latter method maintains the grouping of information by its hold information, which may be desirable for easy retrieval of historical data.