by Mark Deraeve
22. May 2008 03:19
I've created a workflow for document approval in a large firm. There are 4 states in the workflow that a document can have: Draft, Reviewed, Approved, Published.
At first the document is uploaded and recieves the status Draft. The workflow kicks in here! A task is created for all users who are in the sharepoint group 'Reviewers'. They recieve a mail that referres to the task that is created for them. One of the reviewers needs to complete the task in order to activate the workflow to the next fase.
The status of the document is set to Reviewed. When a task is created the user will be informed of it by email to. The email holds the link to the item, in this case the document and it has a link to the task. Here is the content of an email that was send after creating the review task when a author uploaded a document.
So the user has 2 options, read the document via the link, and set the task to complete when he approves with the content. Whe he disapproves, he has to start a manual workflow to inform the reviewer about the corrections that need to be done.
When the last approvers give green light, the document will be published, first the 2nd approvers are asked to give the users who need to be informed about the new document and then it will be copied to an document library that has read permissions for these users. The email that informs the uses holds a link to a webpart page. This page has a webpart that contains a link to the document and a button for read confirmation. The complete workflow can be visualized like this:
This is how it looks like in Sharepoint Designer:
There are still some things that can be improved, but we decided to implement the workflow now because the time it will save. At this moment they manage using outlook only.
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