Add Review Reminders (Recurring Reviews) for Documents & Collections

[connecthome-gmbh]

Add Review Reminders (Recurring Reviews) for Documents & Collections

Problem

Knowledge bases and management systems (e.g., ISO 9001, SOPs, safety manuals) require regular content reviews.
Currently, Outline has no built-in way to remind users to check or re-approve content at a set interval.
Without this, policies or instructions can become outdated without anyone noticing.

---

Proposed Solution

1. Review Reminder Field

   • New property on a document or collection: Review reminder.
   • Accepts either:
     • Absolute date (e.g., 2025-06-30)
     • Recurring interval (e.g., every 6 or 12 months).

2. Responsible Person(s)

   • Default = collection owner / “Responsible” field.
   • Allow override per document (single user or group).

3. Notifications & UX

   • In-app + email notifications when review date is approaching or overdue.
   • “Snooze” options (1 / 2 / 4 weeks).
   • Dashboard view / filter: Due soon, Overdue, Today.

4. Review Mode & Completion

   • Clicking the reminder opens the document in Review Mode.
   • User marks review as done → new due date set (based on interval).

5. Audit Trail

   • Each completed review logged: reviewer, date/time, comments.
   • Exportable as CSV/PDF for audits.

---

Acceptance Criteria

• New “Review reminder” field in document/collection settings.
• Reminder supports fixed date or interval.
• Notifications sent to responsible user(s).
• Dashboard shows pending/overdue reviews.
• Finishing a review logs an entry and resets the timer.
• API endpoints to create/update reminders and fetch due items.

---

API Sketch (example)

POST /documents/:id/reminder
{
  "dueAt": "2025-06-30",
  "interval": "P12M",   // optional ISO 8601 duration
  "assignees": ["user123"]
}

GET /reminders?state=due|overdue
PATCH /reminders/:id { "snooze": "P14D" } 

---

Why This Matters

• Keeps content current and compliant (ISO 9001, safety, HR, onboarding).
• Reduces risk of outdated procedures.
• Useful for any organization managing policies, manuals, or checklists.

---

Open Questions

• Should reminders be global or per-workspace setting?
• Multiple parallel reminders per document?
• Escalation path for overdue reviews (e.g., notify admins after X days)?

[hitsoul11]

+1 for this feature request.

The lack of review reminders is a real gap in Outline compared to other knowledge base tools. Without a built-in way to flag documents for periodic review, stale content is effectively invisible — nobody gets notified, nothing surfaces, and outdated pages accumulate silently.

From our perspective, even a minimal implementation would go a long way:

• A configurable review interval per document
• An assignee (single user)
• An in-app + email notification when the review is due

The more advanced additions (dashboard view, audit trail, snooze) would of course be great, but the above alone would already make a meaningful difference.

Hope this gets some traction.

[ChrisMythos]

+1 for this feature request
Yeah for large Dokumentations, this would be really nice to have.

[simonfriis-proshop]

This would be great for us. Appreciate the suggestion clarity, @gfxclub! I also agree with @hitsoul11 that a portion of this could provide value on its own. From my perspective an MVP should allow for:

• setting defaults at the global level: feature toggle + default amount of days
• overriding global defaults at workspace level
• overriding defaults at doc level
• the notifications themselves

The defaults at global/workspace level in the first iteration would greatly minimize the need for later clean-up for admins/editors compared to shipping defaults later as I see it.

The central dashboard view will be great for helping admins/editors know where to focus review efforts but I can see that being a later iteration.

[ChrisMythos]

@simonfriis-proshop @hitsoul11 @gfxclub
I really like you Ideas, for maximum awareness of outdated pages (even tho everyone can see when the last change was made) i have some further ideas:

• Show stale documents in a dedicated admin/reporting view.
• Display a small warning banner on stale documents.
• Let users mark a document as reviewed without needing to make a content change - if the contens are still upto date and relevant of cause
• Insead of notifying a single user it would be nice to have the option to notify the document owner, last editor, collection admins, or a configured group.

Regards
Chris