A workflow is a sequence of steps describing the life cycle of a document.
Workflows can automate your business processes such as reviewing documents, approving invoices, and publishing company policies to your intranet.
The AODocs workflow configuration interface doesn’t require any specific technical skills. You can configure simple workflows like document approval in a few clicks.
However, even if the configuration of a workflow is easy to do, it’s sometimes more complex to figure out exactly which workflow steps to create, how to assign the workflow roles and which notification emails to send. The methodology below will help you define your workflow to best address your business requirements.
To better understand the business need and implement an AODocs workflow, we recommend that library administrators organize an assessment workshop with key end users.
Note:
If you need guidance to design and implement your workflow, the AODocs service team and the AODocs service partner would be happy to help you organize an assessment workshop and find solutions to optimize your processes.
Contact your AODocs sales representative or send an email to sales@aodocs.com.
The goal of the assessment workshop is to:
- understand your business process
- collect the business requirements
- organize all the data needed for the workflow configuration
Here is a checklist of all the steps that need to be done in an assessment workshop:
Automatically generated table of contents
Visualize the business need
The best way to visualize a business need is to walk through the business process and draw a flowchart detailing all the actions in the process and how they are linked together.
Define workflow states and workflow transitions
Using your flowchart, you can group the actions that belong to the same workflow state and highlight the transitions from one workflow state to another.
Learn more:
Define workflow roles
Using your flowchart, you can then define the different roles involved in the workflow process and define their actions.
Build an email matrix
For each workflow state, define who should receive an email and write its content.
Learn more: Configure workflow emails
Build a permissions matrix
If your workflow requires the permissions of the document to change, define who has read and write access to the document for each workflow state.
Learn more: Set workflow permissions
Specify the workflow steps used for version control
Create a new version
If your workflow requires a new version to be created automatically, specify on which workflow transition the new version of the document needs to be created. This workflow transition will be considered as a versioning transition.
Learn more: Manage document versions in a AODocs library
Learn more: Add workflow transitions
Check-out/check-in
If your workflow requires automatic check-out/check-in, specify on which workflow states the document needs to have a draft version: these workflow states will be considered as a Draft states.
Learn more: What is Check-out / Check-in?
Learn more: Create workflow states
Learn more: Add workflow transitions