Business Optix Library Service – Workflow

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Library Service – Workflow

The Business Optix Library Service provides both standard and

customer-configurable workflows

As standard, the service offers an Approval workflow, which

takes a modified model version through Review and Approval

cycles before ‘publishing’ it to the Stakeholders folder for general

distribution

Because the Approval workflow is a Business Optix model,

customers can tailor it using WorkPad to suit their specific

requirements

Customers can also create their own workflows, and have them

triggered either

o By user request (when saving a model to the library), or

o Automatically, whenever a file is moved into a specified folder

Starting the Approval workflow

To send a model to the standard Approval workflow, you need only:

Specify the Author and Owner, and their email addresses, in the model’s Document Control page

Similarly specify the Reviewers and Approvers, in the Stakeholders area of the Model Explorer...

1. Select the stakeholder Type (Reviewers, then Approvers)

2. Click the [+] button to start adding a user

3. Enter the user’s name and email address

4. Click OK to add the user to the list

While working online, select Save As from the application menu

Select Approval from the Send to Workflow dropdown, and click OK

Completing the Approval workflow

Once started, the Approval workflow will:

Generate HTML for review and approval

Send an email to the owner, author and reviewers with a link to the HTML

Allow the reviewers to add comments to the HTML

After a preset Review period, move on to the Approval stage (and email the owner, author and approvers)

Unless the workflow is cancelled, after a further period it will ‘publish’ the model and all its documentation to the Stakeholders folder

At any stage, the author can review the comments just by opening the original model

Cancelling an Approval workflow

To cancel the workflow at any time:

Open the Approval folder in the library’s Workflow folder

Open the sub-folder whose name is the current workflow step

Delete the workflow .url file

Customizing the Approval workflow

It is easy to customize the Approval workflow using WorkPad:

Open the Approval model in the library’s Workflow folder

Add, remove or edit steps in the diagram

Save the workflow

For each workflow step, you can specify:

The name, next step, timeout (in days), whether to create a copy (as opposed to a shortcut) of the original model, and whether to clean up on completion

Who to email, and the email content, when the step is started

What documentation to produce

Any server-side script to be run

Creating new workflows

You can create new workflows too:

Create a New Model and select Workflow

Add and set the properties of each required step

As well as the workflow steps used in Approval, you can use the (default) Folder type...

This adds a Location property: click the link symbol, then select any folder in the library...

...to have the workflow started automatically whenever a new model (or version of a model) is saved to that folder

Check the Check subfolders? box to include all subfolders of your selected location – if left unchecked, only the folder itself will be monitored