Documentation Center

Workflow

Workflow is the flow of a piece of content through your organization.

Before a piece of content can be published to a website, it may need to pass through a number of departments in your organization. For example, after an author has created the piece of content, an editor may review it for, say, spelling and grammar mistakes, the legal department may wish to perform a legal review, and the sales department may need to fill in the correct price for products described in the piece of content. The piece of content might also be subject to automated processes, such as a word counter, to check that the piece is not too long, or a process that automatically extracts keywords from the text.

Having a piece of content 'flow' through an organization is known as workflow, and a particular sequence of such steps is known as a workflow process. A single step in a workflow process is called an Activity. An activity can be a Manual Activity (that is, to be performed by a human being) or an Automatic Activity (to be performed by a machine).

A piece of content flows through a workflow process in the following way:

  1. Some action prompts the start of the first Activity in a workflow process. This happens either implicitly, because a user creates the piece of content, edits it after it has completed a workflow process, or explicitly, because a user explicitly puts the item in workflow.
  2. The Activity to modify or review the item (possibly along with other items) is assigned to a Group of Users. All Users in the Froup to whom the Activity is assigned see the Activity in their Assigned list in the Things to do panel.
  3. The Activity remains in the Users' Assigned lists until one of them starts the Activity, that is, indicates that she will start working on the item (possibly along with other items). The Activity now disappears from all Assigned lists and reappears in this User's Started list.
  4. The User who picked up the Activity then reviews the item, edits it, or processes it in some other way (possibly along with other items). The User may also reassign the Activity to another User or Group at this point.
  5. The User explicitly finishes the Activity, that is, indicates that she is finished with the item. By doing this, the item disappears from the User's Started list. Sometimes, the User may also choose what happens next (for example, approve it by assigning it to the next group of Users, or reject it by assigning it back to the User who worked on it before).
  6. Next, any Automatic Activities that follow this Activity (possibly none) execute and finish automatically.
  7. Next, one of the following happens:
    • The item enters a new Manual Activity and is assigned to a process, User, or Group of Users. Refer back to step 2.
    • If this was the last Activity, the item exits the workflow process.

At the end of each Activity, the item being processed has a certain status. Typically, this status is used to determine whether the item is ready to be published to a certain website. For example, the workflow process may be configured to automatically publish an item to the staging server at any stage in the workflow process, but to allow publishing to the live server only after it has completed the entire workflow process.