approval workflow

Greetings,

I have set up a publishing /w workflow site. (accounting)

The new site inherits the site permissions from the root which are:

domain admins - full control

domain user - view

I then set up in AD a group called:

SPS-acct-contributer

SPS-acct-approver

I then added some test users to AD:

tstAcctUser

tstAcctExec

and put the tstAcctExec user in the SPS-acct-approver group

and put the tstAcctUser user in the SPS-acct-contributer group

I then went to the site "accounting" as a domain admin and clicked on site settings/"people and groups"

then from the left side nav-bar clicked on site permissions

within site permissions I clicked on action/edit user permission

I got a warning that stated I would be messing with the inherited permissions (yeah, yeah, no problem)

I then added a new permission

SPS-acct-contributer --> (sharepoint) Contribute

SPS-acct-approver --> (sharepoint) Approve

This seemed to make sense to me, but....

when I log in as tstAcctUser

I can edit the accounting site and submit for approval

when I submit for approval I get at the top of the screen that it will be doing a parallel aproval (default)

I go ahead and submit

when I log in as tstAcctExec

I am not able to approve the changes made by tstAcctUser

First -- thanks for reading through this setup

Second -- what am I doing wrong

Thank you

I am also facing the same issue.

I need that my group approval workflow assigns different approvers(HR manager,Reportaing manager) to a service request made by user based on his designation and unit in the organisation.This has to done dynamically and intellegently after fetching data from AD for that specific user.

Please let me know whether this can be done using out of box approval workflow and if yes any directions on how should we proceed in this

Cheers

I filed a bug with PSS that was confirmed similar to what you described.

Basically, the short version is that when Approve rights are given to users via membership in an AD group the Approve/Reject buttons don't show. You can still manually approve the workflow task itself by going to the workflow task list. The problem does not happen when you explicitly list users in SharePoint Groups.

I've confirmed this issue by adding the AD group as a user in SharePoint and also by adding the AD group to a SP Group. Both with the same results.

As was mentioned above, it is important to first confirm that the correct group is set to approve the workflow.

-John

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/rossonmoss

Hi John,

I would be of great help to me if you could comment on my query above.

Thanks

TA123 wrote:

I am also facing the same issue. I need that my group approval workflow assigns different approvers(HR manager,Reportaing manager) to a service request made by user based on his designation and unit in the organisation.This has to done dynamically and intellegently after fetching data from AD for that specific user. Please let me know whether this can be done using out of box approval workflow and if yes any directions on how should we proceed in this Cheers

If you modify the workflow settings for a Document Library (Pages in this case ) you might be able to do this with the OOTB workflow -- it all depends on how complex you need it to be. If you want all approvers (or approver groups) to always approve in parallel or in serial that will work just fine and I can explain how to do that. However, if the workflow would change depending on a set of conditions then you might need to do some custom development. Could you give a high level idea of what type of workflow conditions you are thinking of

-John

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/rossonmoss

HI John,

I think it would be helpful for me if you gave a general "how to" on how to copy / then modify the standard approval process so that I could use different users/groups to approve different pubished pages on my site.

Thank you,

-Bob

Let's assume you want to edit the OOTB workflow for the Pages Document Library. You'd follow these steps:

Site Actions > View All Site Content

Click on Pages Library

Select Settings > Document Library Settings

Select Workflow Settings

Click on the link for Parallel Approval (this is the OOTB publishing workflow)

Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and select 'Next'

You'll see a section called 'Default Workflow Start Values' This is what determines who needs to approve a workflow. The default is set to use Parallel Approval and the Approvers group. You can add more groups to the workflow if you want. So, if you added more groups and kept the approval as Parallel when the workflow was started an approval from a member of each group would be required to approve the document. For Serial, the approvals would happen sequentially.

Copying the workflow would be to create a new workflow for the Document Library. Instead of clicking on "Parallel Approval" at that point you'd select "Add a workflow" and you could configure it as needed.

-John

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/rossonmoss

My suggestion would be to create subsites. So, for HR you'd have a site and for IT you'd have a site. Since you are using a Publishing Portal each has its own Pages library. You could configure the pages library for each site to have unique workflows or security. However, if you want to have unique security when you create the subsite make sure you select the option to not use the parent's security.

-John

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/rossonmoss

Hi John,

As required, please find my requirement below

I want the out of box group approval workflow to assign the task for approval to managers dynamically based upon the user's organisation hierachical position(his reporting manager,his HR manager, his OU head etc).These details are there in the AD.

This workflow needs to be mapped to a ticket based complaint application created in sharepoint.

So my query is that can i modify any out of box workflow to assign the managers(which are not sttic but changes based on the user which is using the application), or do i have to start from scrach i.e. create a custom workflow for this.

Cheers

The big issue is that the workflow would have to be smart enough to look up a user's manager and then route it to him as the approver. An OOTB workflow probably isn't going to work for you, although you might be able to accomplish it with an InfoPath form. Otherwise, a custom workflow is the way to go.

-John

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/rossonmoss

Thanks for your reply.

I am ready with creating some webpart/webservice/windows service component to take out that user's specific manager details from Active directory but i don't know whether i can add this information to the out of the box workflow.

That where i am stuck

Can you help me in this

Cheers