Bernado Nguyen-Hoan's Blog – Coding Stories from an IT Mercenary

The Expiration/Retention policy (part of Information Management Policy) is executed by a couple of timer jobs. In 2007 these jobs are under the PolicyConfigService at the Farm level, and you can modify the schedule of these jobs to run very frequently for debugging purposes (e.g. http://blah.winsmarts.com/2008-10-Authoring_custom_expiration_policies_and_actions_in_SharePoint_2007.aspx – you will need to search for the PolicyConfigService by name though, as the ID will be different for each farm).

In 2010 these timer jobs are no longer at the Farm level, but instead at the WebApplication level. You can force these to run using the following code:

using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://sharePointServer"))
			{
				List<string> jobNamesToRun = new List<string>()
													{
														"Information management policy",
														"Expiration policy"
				                                   	};

				foreach (var name in jobNamesToRun)
				{
					var job = site.WebApplication.JobDefinitions.FirstOrDefault(
						j => j.DisplayName.Equals(name, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase));

					if (job != null)
					{
						Console.WriteLine("Running job '{0}'", name);
						job.RunNow();
					}
				}
			}
Console.WriteLine("Enter..");
Console.ReadLine();

It is important to execute the “Information management policy” job before the “Expiration policy” job. The first evaluates and set the expiration date for list items. The second is the job that actually executes the defined expiration action (e.g. run a workflow, etc).