Bobby's SharePoint World

In my previous post, we discussed the shortcomings of SharePoint 2010 Approval workflow. Though empowering and convenient to use, the out-of-box workflow lacks a user-centered experience. To quickly recap, I highlighted five limitations in particular:

• Inability to specify workflow condition
• Potential governance concern
• Vague email notifications
• Due Date Duration not accounted for
• Rejected document marked as “Completed”

Fortunately, through SharePoint Designer (SPD) 2010, you can extend the approval workflow process. This post outlines how to configure the approval workflow using the SPD workflow designer. Though it’s certainly not the only way to customize approval workflow, I find myself coming back to this similar framework when implementing approval processes.

Step 1 – Expose “Start Approval Process” action in workflow designer

1. Open SPD 2010 and create a new List Workflow for your Document Library
2. Click Action in the ribbon. Then select “Start Approval Process” under the “Task Actions” heading
   

3. Click on “these users” to set the approval designations
4. The next screen you’ll see mimics the Approval Workflow design form in the UI. Fill in the appropriate approval details. (Note: You can add multiple approval stages by clicking this icon and selecting “Insert Assignment Stage”)
   

5. After clicking Ok, you’ve completed the 1st step. Click on “Approval” to start configuring the details of the approval workflow.
   

6. Optional Step

   For every approval action you utilize in SPD, SharePoint creates a custom Approval Site Content Type. In other word, if you create 5 approval actions through SPD, you’ll end up with 5 different Approval Content Types (see screenshot below). So, it’s a good idea to rename the Approval Site Content Type and match your workflow name. Renaming to “Approval – Team A Proposal Draft,” for example, would provide better context and probably serve your well in the future.
   

Step 2 – Update email notification for the requester

1. Click on “Change the behavior of the overall task process” in the Approval editor page
   

2. Find the Step “When the Task Process Starts”
3. Then click on the Action “then Email Workflow Context: Initiator”
   

4. Change the subject line to something more descriptive
   Otherwise SharePoint would send an email with a generic subject line, i.e.: “Approval started on.” To change the subject, click on icon and replace [%Task Process: Process Name%] with something easier for your team to relate to, i.e.: RFP Approval, Draft Report Approval, etc.
5. Clean up the email body. Below is a screenshot example of my change:
   

   The following Data Sources and Fields were kept same:

   • [%Task Process:Item Title (Unencoded)%]
   • [%Task Process:Item Title%]
   • [%Task Process:Participant List%]
   • View the status of this workflow
   • URL is the same
   • Changed label to “Monitor the status of the approval here”

   The following Data Source and Field were added:

   • [%Workflow Context: Initiator%]
   • Data Source = Workflow Context
   • Field from source = Initiator
   • Return field as = Display Name

Email as end result of Step 2:

Step 3 – Update email for approver(s)

1. Click on “Change the behavior of a single task” in the Approval editor page
   

2. Find the Step “When a Task is Pending”
3. Then find the Condition “If Current Task: External Participant is empty,” and click on “Current Task: Assigned To”
   

4. Clean up the email body. Below is a screenshot example of my change:
   

   The following Data Sources and Fields were kept same:

   • [%Current Task: Title%]
   • This value comes from the Title field in the Select Task Process Participants screen (see #4 in Step 1 above)
   • [%Workflow Context: Initiator%]
   • [%Task Process:Item Title%]

   The following Data Sources and Fields were added:

   • [%Current Task: Assigned To%]
   • Data Source = Current Task: Approval
   • Field from source = Assigned To
   • Return field as = Display Name
   • [%Current Task:Due Date%]
   • Data source = Current Task: Approval
   • Field from source = Due Date
   • Return field as = Short Date
   • Access approval form in SharePoint
   • To create hyperlink, highlight the text then click icon
   • Assign [%Current Task:Form_URN%] on the address field:
     • Data source = Current Task: Approval
     • Field from source = Form_URN
     • Return field as = As String
   • Click OK a couple of times and you should see the following below. Then click OK.
     

Email as end result of Step 3:

Step 4 – Update rejection notice

1. Click on “Change the behavior of the overall task process” in the Approval editor page
   

2. Find the Step ““When the Task Process Completes”
3. Find “Set workflow status to Rejected.” Then click below “Set workflow status to Rejected.”
4. Update email subject line to denote rejection:
   • Add “Set Workflow Variable” from Action on the ribbon
     
   • Click on “workflow variable” then select “Variable: CompletionMailTitle”
   • Click on “value” to assign a rejection tagline to be displayed in the email subject line
   • Access the String Builder by clicking this icon
   • Use the word “Rejected” combined with brief info about the rejected file
   • E.g.: “REJECTED – Draft Report: [%Task Process:Item Title%]”
   • Data source = Task Process: Approval
   • Field from source = Item Title
   • Return field as = As String

   

5. Update email content to denote rejection:
   • Click under the action you just created to add another workflow action
   • Click “Set Workflow Variable” from Action on the ribbon
   • Click on “workflow variable” then select “Variable: CompletionMailReason”
   • Click on “value” to assign a rejection message to be displayed in the email body
   • Access the String Builder by clicking this icon
   • Include the word “Rejected” along with some context about the rejected file
     
6. At this point, your set of Rejected actions should look similar to the following
   

7. Scroll below and click on the last action – “Email Workflow Context: Initiator” under “Else”
   

8. Clean up the email body
• Remove the first line. Otherwise, the words “Approval” and “Completed” will be included on the rejected email
• Make sure you keep both [%Variable: CompletionReason%] and [%TaskProcess:Consolidated Comments%] because they provide the rejected status and comments from the user(s) who rejected the file
• Everything else is optional. Please feel free to redesign as needed.

Email as end result of Step 4:

Step 5 – Update notification for approved files

1. Similar to Step 4. Only this time, we’re configuring the email notification for an approved document
2. Click on “Change the behavior of the overall task process” in the Approval editor page
3. Find the Step ““When the Task Process Completes”
4. Find “If Variable: IsItemApproved equals Yes” then click below “Set workflow status to Approved.”
5. Update email subject line to denote Approval:
   • Add “Set Workflow Variable” from Action on the ribbon
   • Click on “workflow variable” then select “Variable: CompletionMailTitle”
   • Click on “value” to assign a rejection tagline to be displayed in the email subject line
   • Access the String Builder by clicking this icon
   • Use the word “Approved” combined with brief info about the approved file
   • E.g.: “APPROVED – Draft Report: [%Task Process:Item Title%]”
   • Data source = Task Process: Approval
   • Field from source = Item Title
   • Return field as = As String
6. Update email content to denote Approval:
   • Click under the action you just created to add another workflow action
   • Click “Set Workflow Variable” from Action on the ribbon
   • Click on “workflow variable” then select “Variable: CompletionMailReason”
   • Click on “value” to assign a rejection message to be displayed in the email body
   • Access the String Builder by clicking this icon
   • Include the word “Approved” along with some context about the approved file
     
7. At this point, your set of Approved actions should look similar to the following
   

Email as end result of Step 5:

And there you have it! Five steps to get you started with enhancing the approval workflow. We focused mostly on emails, but there are still other system generated emails that you can configure. Furthermore, there are a slew of other functions that you can explore, e.g., Task Form Fields and Task Outcomes to extend the approval capability even further. I hope this post would get you started in the right direction.

The Approval workflow in SharePoint has been helping teams automate business processes since the days of MOSS 2007 and WSS3.0. It is the most commonly used workflow and since it’s pre-built, SharePoint has done the heavy lifting so your setup time is greatly reduced. However, the Approval workflow can be a bane to many. On one hand, you can be up and running with just a few clicks; on the other, the out-of-box user experience may not be very intuitive for the users.

There’s certainly more than one way to skin this cat, but I find myself repeating a similar series of steps to enhance the experience. I look to document these steps before Microsoft officially upgrades my SharePoint Online environment to version 2013. I hope that, in the process, this post could also be useful to other SharePointers.

Before diving into the proposed solution, let’s first breakdown some of the challenges. Here’s my personal Top 5 Limitations of the SharePoint Approval Workflow:

1. Inability to specify workflow condition

   Applying workflow through the browser only provides you with the option to either start the workflow automatically or start it manually. You can’t conditionally design a parameter around how the workflow starts. For example, if you want the workflow to run only when a specific type of file is uploaded, you can’t do so through the browser.

2. Potential governance concern

   Users, who can manually start the workflow, can also change the workflow’s rule and designation. When teeing up a document for an approval, SharePoint allows for ad-hoc update to the workflow logic. Almost every makeup to the workflow (approvers, deadline, etc.) is up for grabs to everyone who has access to run it manually. This open-ended structure leaves you at the mercy of your users, who can accidentally (or not) change the most fundamental elements of the approval, thus altering the orientation of your business processes.

   

3. Vague email notifications

   The auto-generated emails from the Approval workflow often lack clarity. Upon receiving the email, users may not know how to move forward because the emails have duplicated info, ambiguous message, and most importantly, unclear instructions on how to approve the document. Users would be notified to “Perform specific activities required” without any other context.

   Outlook integration feature – which could open the approval form from the email and is actually very helpful – gets lost in the mix because the language in the email makes no reference to Outlook. Users are simply instructed to “Use the Open this task button” – a “button” that’s located at the top of the email and is very easy to miss, especially in the Outlook preview pane.

4. Due Date Duration not accounted for

   There are 2 ways to set approval due dates – you can either assign an actual due date or specify a duration of the approval task. For the most part, the preference should be to set deadlines by duration so you don’t pin yourself down to one particular due date for all documents. Furthermore, should enough time passes by and your due date is in the past, SharePoint will display an error message to the user initiating the workflow.

   

   Unfortunately, if you were to assign due date by duration, the approval workflow would not account for it. The system generated email would simply assign your due date with “None.”

   

5. Rejected document marked as “Completed”

   I saved the best for last, because this one trips me up the most. Receiving an email from the SharePoint library with a subject line of “Approval has completed” does NOT necessarily mean that your document has been approved. Your supervisor could very well have rejected your document and as long as all the required tasks are done, SharePoint deems the workflow as “completed.”

   The body of the email doesn’t help the cause either by repeating such words as “approval,” “successfully,” “completed” to further mislead the user. Only if you were to look carefully, would you see 1 mention of the rejection buried in the middle of the email content. A definite flaw from a user experience design perspective.

   

Despite these challenges, I still believe that there are a lot of business values provided by the SharePoint Approval workflow. Thankfully, there are a few simple ways to overcome these shortcomings and I look to document these steps on my upcoming blog post.

Do you have other challenges with the workflow that’s been plaguing you? If so, please feel free to share your experience. Hopefully we can all compare notes on the implementation work-around and be more productive at the other end.

[Update: My next post in this approval workflow series is now available. Read the 5 Steps to Enhance SharePoint 2010 Approval Workflow]