SharePoint - Document Management - Part 6

In this last part of my document management series I want to talk about workflow. You have three options for using workflow with documents in SharePoint:

1. Versioning settings - content approval workflow
2. Workflow settings - browser workflow
3. SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow

Let's look a bit closer at these options.

Versioning settings - content approval workflow

You can activate content approval in the versioning settings menu. This enables a new column:



This document is only viewable for the author of the document and users with approval permissions. You have to create a new SharePoint group, or use a default group, with approval permission for this document library. The major downside of this approach is that there is no notification towards the approvers. This will result in documents being in the approval status for a long time.



Workflow settings - browser workflow

The second option is to create a new workflow through the workflow settings of the document library. There is the approval workflow that has the following description:

“Routes a document for approval. Approvers can approve or reject the document, reassign the approval task, or request changes to the document.”

You have a lot more options then the first workflow option:



You can give the workflow a name, select the task and history list and define the start options. Click at Next to see more options:



You can now assign the workflow to one or more users/groups, create a custom message and determine the duration options. This gives you a lot more flexibility in creating workflows. The major downside to this approach is that you cannot work with conditions. For example: You want to create a workflow task based at the type of document for a specific group. You cannot configure this with the browser workflows. This is were the power of SharePoint Designer will help you!


SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow


The last option I will discuss is workflow in SharePoint Designer. Let’s open the site and click at Workflows in the navigation bar:



There are so many options here so this can be a bit overwhelming in the beginning. This is one of the reasons why end users should not use SharePoint Designer without a proper training. There are a lot of topics on the Net about workflow in SharePoint Designer, I will just focus at creating a new workflow for our document library. Click at List Workflow and select the document library. Give the workflow a name and description and you can start building your workflow:



You can now start building your own workflow from scratch. The great thing is that you have a lot of Conditions and Actions to enhance your workflow. The following links are really useful in finding your way through these conditions and actions:


Actions
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-designer-help/workflow-actions-in-sharepoint-designer-2010-a-quick-reference-guide-HA010376961.aspx


Conditions
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-designer-help/workflow-conditions-in-sharepoint-designer-2010-a-quick-reference-guide-HA010376962.aspx

Let’s say our document library contains a field Department, you can use the condition ‘If field equals value’ to assign the approval action to different approvers. The other great thing about SharePoint Designer is that you can create your own e-mail notifications or changes existing ones. I won’t discuss this in detail in this article but I am planning to dedicate an article to this subject soon!


Tips and tricks
I hope you enjoyed my document management series and this last article. I want to end this series with my last section of tips and tricks.


Moving documents

• The workflows described in this article are bound to one site, it is not possible to move documents to other sites. You need Visual Studio or Nintex Workflow for these type of actions.

Content type

• Are you using the same document template on multiple sites? Do you need the same workflow for all the sites? Create a content type workflow.

E-mail notifications

• You can use SharePoint Designer to create your own e-mail notifications. This means you can personalize it.

Posted in: Document Management, Office 365, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Online 2010