Work with drafts, versions and workflow

 

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Overview

Draft approval workflow and document versioning are supported in Document Manager.

This section provides the administrator an overall picture of the Document Manager draft approval process (workflow).

Document Manager also provides versioning support, which is disabled by default. With versioning enabled for the working document library, users can create new versions of documents, as well as view and retrieve documents by version.

 

Draft approval (workflow) process

The draft approval process (workflow) is an optional component that administrators can enable for each document library. Workflow allows authorized users to gain control over writing and editing processes. Users can also work with drafts without the draft approvals process enabled, and the drafts will simply skip the approval process.

In workflow, people are assigned roles in a process. For example, there may be a work team with a software developer and a technical writer. The writer starts the workflow process when he creates a document in Document Manager. When he saves that document, the document is automatically submitted for review to the developer. The developer can either approve the document, or send the document back to the writer for changes. This process repeats until the developer approves the document. When the document is approved, the document is made public in Document Manager.

There are two types of users in the workflow process:

  • authors
  • reviewers

Administrators can use the Document Libraries portlet to select the group of document reviewers for a document library.

By default, the reviewer group is wpsDocReviewer, which means that anyone who is a member of wpsDocReviewer (or a member of a group that is included in wpsDocReviewer) is a document reviewer for that library. Users who are members of the selected reviewer group can approve documents in the workflow process.

The draft approval process is as follows:

  1. The author creates or edits a document.

  2. The author can choose to save the document as a private draft, which allows the author to continue working on the document until it is ready to be submitted for approval. Alternatively, the author can submit the document for approval to continue in the workflow process. After the author submits her draft for approval, the document appears in the reviewer's Submitted Drafts view.

    The author can cancel her changes before they are approved by selecting Delete Draft when the document is selected in the Drafts folder. If she is creating a new document, it will then be deleted from the document library, and if she is editing an existing document, only her pending changes are deleted.

  3. After opening the document in the Drafts folder, the reviewer can either:

    • Accept the document by clicking Accept.
    • Reject the document by clicking Reject.
    • Edit the document by clicking Edit.

  4. If the reviewer rejects the draft, it appears in the author's Private Drafts view, and can then be edited and resubmitted.

  5. If the document was rejected, the author makes the changes and submits the document again.

  6. Steps 2 and 3 repeat until the reviewer approves the document.

  7. When approved, the document appears in the folder where the author first created the document, and is available for public viewing.

There can be multiple potential reviewers; however, only one reviewer can approve or reject a document. There is no process for assigning which reviewer gets approval authority. The first potential reviewer to approve or reject the document makes the decision for all the reviewers.

 

Draft documents

We can work with a document in the draft state in Document Manager. Saving a document as a draft allows us to store a partially changed document in Document Manager without making it visible to all of the other users in the library. We can edit the draft as many times as you wish before submitting it. Making a document a draft document is a good option if we need more time to work on the document.

To create a new document draft, complete the following steps:

  1. Navigate to the folder within Document Manager where you want the draft to be created.

  2. Click New, then select the type of draft document you want to create. For example, to create a new Rich Text Editor draft, select Rich Text Editor File from the drop-down menu.

  3. Type the document name in the File name field. We can leave the Title field blank and Document Manager will create a default title for the document. We can also enter a description of the new document and select the language of the new document.

  4. Click Save as private draft to save the document, or if workflow is enabled, we can elect to submit the document for approval.

 

See also

 

Parent Topic

Document Manager portlet

 

Related tasks

Enable workflow for document approval