Advice on Approval Workflow

Hi there

My company wants to use Documentum to manage process documents. Most users will be consumers and should only be allowed to view approved documents. A small number of contributors will exist and will be able to either author or approve/modify documents. Lifecycles appear to provide the functionality required to track the state of a document. Standard Documentum workflows seem to provide sufficient functionality to drive the communications process. What I'm trying to get my head around is the mechanics of document access. For example, is it possible for an author to update an existing approved document and allow an approver to verify/modify the updated content before it gets checked in?

Cheers

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Comments

EzequielFoscarini

You can have this kind of control through Permission Sets (ACLS). So, you can define one permission set per lifecycle state. saying who can have permission on that document. Also, permissions can be manually managed. I mean, the author may change the doc pemission giving write permission to an approver. There are many ways to you configure/manage permissions in Documentum.

Let me know if it helps.

Thanks,

Ezequiel

mpandit

I believe that you need to configure a full application containing workflows, lifecycle and ACL / permissions sets. Documentum lifecycles provide a bunch of actions that can be used to apply ACL when a document enters particular state. Furthermore, you can write your custom methods that can be invoked from workflow automatic activity to achieve desired results. The developer site provides some useful samples for doing developing both these functionality.

Thanks

Manish

ukdavo

Thanks for the replies. I am vaguely familiar with the general functionality of methods, lifecycles and workflows but I've had very limited practical experience. I appreciate that you can programmatically change ownership, ACLs, etc but I'm still struggling to get to grips with understanding document access within a workflow. For example, lets say that an author has checked out a document. Before checking it back in, can the document be viewed/edited/approved by another user or does it have to be checked in first?

Cheers

mpandit

That depends on how you configure your application. For your information, I've attached a very old presentation (from DevCon 2001) that describes every detail of all the concepts. Even though this document is very old, conceptually most of the things in latest versions remain the same.

Hope this helps.

Manish

AjoshGS

Hi.. Does any one know about setting due date for a workflow. We have a requirement to set due date in workflow. thank you