Skip to main content

How to create approval workflow in SharePoint 2013

When a new document is added to the doc library, a task email is sent to the approvers to review the doc. The due date for the task can be set in the workflow. If one of the approvers, approves the doc, the workflow is ended.

Go to the document library, and from the ribbon, click on Workflow settings – Add a workflow

In Add a workflow page, select Approval workflow and enter a name for the workflow

Note – The out of box workflows are of SharePoint 2010 template. To use SharePoint 2013 template, the workflow has to be created with SharePoint Designer 2013. Also, if there are no approval workflow templates, go to Site Settings – Site collection features and activate Workflow.
Set the workflow to be started manually and when an item is created.
As approvers, a person or group can be set. If there is more than one stage of approval, a new stage can be added and the action can be set to follow the parallel or serial sequence. In parallel sequence, the approval stages will happen together and in serial sequence, one stage would be completed at a time. The duration for each task can be set in days/weeks/months.

The document can be rejected, if any one of the approvers rejects it or if changes are made to the document before the end of the workflow. The content approval status can be updated based on the approver's action.

The approver would get a task notification email. From the email, the user can click on the Open task form and the task form would come up. 
The approver can open up the doc from the task form, from the notification ribbon, as marked. The approver can enter their comments and approve or reject the doc. If required, the task can be reassigned to someone else.

Based on the action taken by the approver, the task is updated in the task list. The task is marked complete and the workflow ends.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cannot open SharePoint 2010 Approval task form from Outlook

When trying to click on Open this task from Outlook 2010, it brings an error - " Outlook cannot open a new form. The form contains schema validation errors" Element '{ http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}div ' is unexpected according to the content model of parent element '{ http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/infopath/2009/WSSList/dataFields}Body '. As given in the error message, the issue is with the Body column of the workflow tasks list. For the approval workflow, there would be a tasks list. In the workflow task list, the Body column is Enhance Rich multi-line column. Change the setting to Plain text, instead of enhanced rich text. After that do an iisreset.

How to link to Download a copy option in Office 365/SharePoint 2013

At times it is required to have the option to save a copy of a document uploaded in SharePoint document library, in a page or a webpart. The url to get the save option for a doc is - http:// site /_layouts/download.aspx?SourceUrl= url-of-document-in-library Change the bold text with the actual url, i.e., with the site url and the url to the doc in the doc library. For example, if the site is www.contso.com and the doc "Test" is uploaded in SiteAssets library, the url to save a copy would be - http://contso.com/_layouts/download.aspx?SourceUrl=http://contso.com/SiteAssets/Test.docx

Examples of utility function in SPD 2010 workflows

In SPD workflows, under Actions, there is a set of Utility functions. Using the substring function, a string can be trimmed from the beginning/end/or from a position, with or without specifying the length. An example, to remove the domain part from the user name, e.g. abcdomain/username, follow the below steps 1.        Use “Extract substring from the index of string” 2.        It would insert a step in WF as “Copy from string , starting at 0 (Output to Variable: substring ) 3.        Click on ‘string’ and click fx to get the field to be trimmed. 4.        It would bring the look-up window. 5.        Select the field and click OK. In this e.g., Data Source: Current Item and Field from Source: Created By 6.        To set the index, click on 0 and enter the required number, here it would be 1...