Sending a Document For Approval

When the author addressed all comments and suggested changes have been addressed, the document can be sent for approval.

The approval stage of the lifecycle initiates the following events:

  • The review watermark is cleared from the document
  • The source document is locked
  • The track changes feature is disabled.
  • A PDF rendition of the document is generated and saved, but not displayed, in the library if the document type is configured for PDF rendition
  • A link to the PDF rendition is added to the latest PDF column associated with the document
  • The source document is incremented to a major (published) version
  • The PDF rendition has the source version set to the source document’s version
  • The lifecycle status is set to Approval
  • The workflow status is set to Approval Workflow In Progress
  • An approval workflow is initiated
  • Approval tasks are generated for each of the approvers configured for the associated document type
  • An Email notification advising of the assigned approval task are sent to each of the approvers

To begin the approval process:

  1. Select Change Lifecycle Status from NextDocs menu on the document’s context menu
  2. If prompted to select an approver, either enter the user id and validate by clicking on the validation button or search for an approver using the people picker
    Note: Just like the review stage, the approval stage can be configured for one to three phases and only those phases configured for user-defined entries generates a prompt. Other configured phases are displayed but not modifiable
  3. Click Start Workflow

The approval process initiates a workflow and updates the workflow status to Approval Workflow In Progress. The status display remains until either all approval tasks are completed or the approval workflow terminates.

The workflow status provides a link to the Workflow Overview screen which contains the workflow status details, the user actions, the workflow tasks, and a link to the technical details for the currently in progress approval workflow.