IDocs are generally considered technical objects. Whether you need them to archive or delete, it depends upon your corporate retention policy.
Another thing that you should consider is custom reports. Are there any reports out there where you need to read historical data? If so then you may have to archive the IDOC instead of deleting it.
WE11 is a good SAP standard tool to delete IDOC but here are few issues:
1. IDoc selection is based upon some Dates and Message Type. So no way to restrict based upon IDoc numbers.
2. Program does not check the status. It will delete all the IDOCs that are selected based upon selection criteria entered.
3. No details provided as to which IDoc is deleted?
Alternative:
Clearly standard tool WE11 provide very limited functionality.
To mitigate this and to bring utmost innovations to IDOC MANAGEMENT are as a whole, there is a really cool product - Error Message Manager (EMM) out there. This product provides Editing, Analysis, Monitoring, Mass Editing, Mass Status change, Mass Delete, and a number of other user friendly features.
Please visit website www.omksolutions.com OR
send an email to emm@omksolutions.com to learn more about it.