Workflow is an automation of a business process, during which documents are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules. Every content management system implementation will have workflow requirements. Workflow provides ownership and control on the content and processes. Alfresco web project uses workflows to support any set of changes, either automated or user-driven steps, in a business process before final commit to the Staging Sandbox. WCM Workflows can be configured for each form or for any arbitrary set of non-form assets. In this chapter, you will understand the basic out-of-the-box workflow capabilities of the Alfresco WCM and the ways to extend it as per your business requirements.
By the end of this chapter you will have seen the:
- Advantages of workflow
- Introduction to the workflow process
- Out-of-the-box workflows
- Associating workflows to web forms
- Associating workflows to web projects
- Dynamically changing workflow for each snapshot submission
- Process of defining and using your custom workflow
- Use of expiration date
Consider that we want to develop any website; so our first step will be to create web content, and the next step will be to get the approval of the reviewers in order to publish content onto live servers. We would also like to set up a test server so that one can preview the changes and finally the content can be pushed to the staging servers and then live servers. At each stage it seems we require a set of processes to be followed to get our approval completed and go to the next stage. This can be achieved using WCM Workflows.
WCM Workflows are required to follow the user approval process for submitted content, to publish them on the Staging Sandbox. You must deal with the approval of content items that are routed through workflow and the submission of the items to staging servers and then the live server. Submitted changes are routed via workflow (assume workflow is configured for the web project) for one or multiple users to review and approve, either serially or in parallel, using Alfresco's out-of-the-box workflow (or any custom-built WCM Workflow). On approval of the item, content is submitted to the Staging Sandbox. Even if we don't configure workflow for any item, the submission takes place in the background using workflow and each content item remains in the Modified Items list until its submission is complete. To verify this you can see a workflow task in the My Task To Do dashlet of the content reviewer for a fraction of a second. Refresh the page as necessary, to see if the workflow task has been removed from the My Task To Do dashlet and that the Modified Items list of the user's sandbox is empty.
The additional advantage you get from workflow is that you can configure the launch date and expiration date when promoting content to staging. Prior to this launch date, users can preview the changes and cancel the pending launch if required. In the Staging box, it will be reflected in Content Awaiting Launch. Upon expiration, users can see that item as a task in their My Tasks To Do dashlet to decide whether the content should be updated or removed from the site. This content expiration also works in conjunction with Alfresco's new Links Validation service, ensuring that the site's link integrity is incrementally tested against the new pending update. In this manner, content cannot only be regularly refreshed through an automated, task-driven review process, but can also be tested upon change so that no errors are accidentally introduced in the form of broken links.
Another advantage is that once the content is approved, a snapshot is taken to the Staging box. For each submission a snapshot is maintained, which gives the advantage to roll back to any submission at any point of time.
In the previous chapter you learned how to create content. At this point, your web project is populated with content items, some imported and some created. Now you want to submit the content to the Staging box. You must configure a workflow process to get the approval, so the content is now routed through workflow to content reviewers for approval. Once you have approved all of your content, modified items are deployed to the staging server.