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Workflow concepts

When you modify a content item, your modification may be part of a larger workflow process, therefore it is important to understand how workflow works. This topic provides a high-level explanation of workflow concepts.

Workflow concepts

Your organization may impose workflow on certain types of content items in Tridion Sites. This means that such content items must move through a prescribed sequence of steps is known as a workflow process. A single step in a workflow process is called an activity, which can be a manual step that is performed by a human or an automatic step that is performed by the system.

The departments or teams involved in the workflow process are defined groups with each group performing one or more activities. When one activity finishes, the next activity is assigned to a specific group, which may be automatic or it may be a manual action where a user finishes the activity and then selects the next activity. Any member of the assigned group can pick up the activity, but as soon as one of them does, the activity is then exclusively owned by that user.

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. For example, the workflow process may be configured to automatically publish an item to a website's 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.

A simple workflow example

As an example of a typical workflow, after an author creates a piece of content, an editor may be required to review it for spelling and grammar mistakes. In addition, 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.

For a simple example, we'll focus on just on the following two groups and two activities:
  • The "Authors" group is tasked with the activity "Creating a Component."
  • The "Editors" group is tasked with the activity of "Reviewing a Component."

First, a member of the Authors group creates a Component, and when they finish this Component, the "Reviewing a Component" activity is automatically triggered and assigned to the Editors group.

A member of the Editors group now picks up the activity, and becomes the owner of the activity.

The Editor then finishes the activity and the workflow requires that they reject or approve the item. Depending on their choice, the item then either flows back to the previous group (the Authors group), or on to the next group.