Lifecycle Management
Enrolling a new person is just the beginning. Over time, their relationship with your organization will evolve — roles will change, affiliations will shift, new responsibilities will be added, and eventually, at some point, their connection to some or all of your systems will end. Registry supports your organization through every stage of this journey.
Lifecycle management in Registry covers three broad phases:
Bringing people in — Enrollment Flows are Registry’s mechanism for creating new Person records through interactive, human-driven processes: applications, invitations, approvals, self-signup, and multi-step onboarding workflows. Flows are fully configurable and plugin-based, so they can reflect exactly how your organization actually works. Terms and Conditions lets you present and track policy agreement as part of that process.
Managing relationships over time — Once a person is in Registry, their status reflects the current state of their relationship with your organization. Status is calculated from Person Role statuses, which in turn can be set manually, derived from valid from/valid through dates, updated by Pipelines, or changed automatically by Expiration Policies. The status model drives what data gets provisioned downstream, so it is the central mechanism for expressing who has access to what.
Offboarding and expiration — When a person’s role ends, Registry can manage the transition automatically. Expiration Policies define rules for what happens as validity periods approach and pass — moving people through Grace Period, Expired, Suspended, or Archived states and triggering reprovisioning to downstream systems at each stage.
Together, these mechanisms mean Registry doesn’t just store identity data at a point in time — it actively manages the lifecycle of that data as relationships change.
1. Enrollment Flows
Redesigned in v5 Available: v5.1.0 Enrollment Flows are Registry’s mechanism for bringing new people into a CO through interactive, human-driven processes. Every organization has its own terminology for this — applications, invitations, intakes, signups — and its own steps: collecting attributes, verifying email, obtaining approvals, requiring policy agreement. Enrollment Flows let you model exactly that process.
A Flow consists of a series of Steps, each implemented by a plugin. The order of Steps, the Actor types who complete them (Petitioner, Enrollee, Approver), and the notifications sent at handoffs are all configurable. A single Registry deployment can have as many Enrollment Flows as needed to represent the different ways people join your COs and COUs.
Person records are not created until the Petition is successfully finalized — only at the end of a completed Flow do operational records appear. This prevents partial records from accumulating when Petitions are rejected or abandoned.
Note
Enrollment Flows were completely redesigned in v5.1.0 and are not available in Registry v5.0.x.
2. Terms and Conditions
Available: v5.2.0 Terms and Conditions let you present policy documents to people and track their agreement. Each T&C can be configured with an agreement duration (requiring periodic re-agreement), scoped to a specific COU, and tied to content hosted either in a Mostly Static Page within Registry or at an external URL.
Agreement at enrollment is collected through the Agreement Collector Enroller Plugin as a Step within an Enrollment Flow. Administrators can also record agreement on behalf of a person, or revoke an existing agreement.
3. Status and Validity
Status is how Registry represents where a person stands in their lifecycle. Each Person Role carries a status, and the overall Person status is calculated as the “most preferred” of those Role statuses. Statuses range from Active and Grace Period (full provisioning) through Suspended and Expired (reduced provisioning) to Archived (no provisioning).
Person Role validity dates — valid from and valid through — drive automatic status transitions without requiring manual updates. A Role with a future valid from date enters Pending Activation; a Role that passes its valid through date becomes Expired. When needed, an entire Person record can be Locked to immediately disable access regardless of Role statuses.
4. Expiration Policies
Expiration Policies are rules that automatically manage person status over time — for example, moving a person from Active to Grace Period when a Role validity date approaches, or transitioning to Expired after the grace period ends. They run as a scheduled background job rather than in response to individual events, making them suitable for managing large populations.
Note
Expiration Policies are referenced in the Registry PE Technical Reference as a mechanism for status change, but a dedicated v5 configuration page is not yet available in the Technical Manual. For current configuration guidance, see the Expiration Policies page in the v4 Technical Manual, and check the Registry community for v5 updates.
5. If You Are Migrating from v4
Several significant changes affect lifecycle management when migrating from v4:
Enrollment Flows are completely redesigned in v5.1.0. The v4 flow model (Enrollment Sources, Enrollment Wedges, and the Default Enrollment fallback) has been replaced by a fully plugin-based Step system. All Enrollment Flows must be rebuilt for v5.
Enrollment Flows are not available in v5.0.x. Deployments on v5.0.x cannot use Enrollment Flows.
Operational records are now created only at finalization. In v4, records could be created or updated during the Enrollment Flow even if the Petition was later rejected. In v5.1.0+, records are only committed when a Petition successfully finalizes.
Terms and Conditions are available as of v5.2.0. The feature existed in v4 but was not yet included in v5.0.x or v5.1.x.
Status terminology has changed. The v4 status “Deleted” is now “Archived” in v5. A new “Pending Activation” status exists in v5 for Roles whose valid from date has not yet been reached. Several enrollment-state statuses no longer appear on Person records in v5.2.0 because Person records are not created until Petition finalization.