Chapter 19. Working with Workflows

We have already created a custom lifecycle and associated it with our custom News Article object type in Chapters 11 and 12. This means that content created from the News Article object type (and template) can be routed through the different states of the lifecycle, such as WIP, Staging, and Approved. Have you ever thought about how content automatically progresses through the different lifecycle states? You can certainly select content items and manually promote, demote or power-promote them to move them across various linear lifecycle states. However, in an actual scenario your business users would want an automated process to achieve this. What the business teams typically want is a controlled and automated mechanism whereby content created by a group of users can be sent across electronically to a reviewer group for an initial round of review. The number of sequential/parallel groups of reviewers or approvers could be specific to a particular business. Once the content is finally reviewed and approved, it should be made available on the live website and should be in the terminal lifecycle state (say Approved/Active). At any point of time during the review and approval process, the content should be in the intermediate lifecycle states such as WIP or Staging.

This automated business process required to route content through its numerous lifecycle stages before publishing it to the production website is termed workflow in Documentum lingo.