Document Request for Approval & Email Distribution

[JaclynRe]

I am hoping more advanced Review & Approval users can give some insight. We are maturing naturally with our Workfront use and as such, I have some champions who are dipping their toe into the document review and approval functionality. Until now, we have not utilized this great feature. Here is their use case: End user uploads document (client checklist) to their project plan. This document needs to be sent to 8 managers for review with only one approval needed. Here is what the champion created: Created internal email distribution list with the 8 managers. Provided simple instructions to the end user to attached their document and enter the distro email address to send the approval. Here is what happened: We have single sign-on enabled. The distribution list would receive the notification of the request. A manager would click the link to either "See it in Workfront" or "Approve Request". The functionality worked about 50% of the time. The other half the user would get "You do not have permission to view this document". Upon investigation, it looked like Workfront was logging that person in from the email link as the email distribution, not as themselves. I checked the people profiles and it looks like if a user enters an email address to send an approval, the system creates an external user profile for that email. We had some users typing the email address with all lower case and some with upper and lower case combinations which resulted in 3 different external user profiles of the same email address. Yikes. I finally deleted those and created a user profile with verbiage for the end users to enter when submitting approvals instead of the email address. But, the issue was still happening where the manager would click the approve link from the WF notification and get an access error. For the document approval, WF only allows someone to type a name or email, teams cannot be used. I looked into creating an automated workflow for proofs, but attaching an automated workflow to the document was too many clicks for the end users when they only need one approval out of 8. The best way we could find to send the document was to have the end users type all eight names in the approval box. But, I still feel like that's not the perfect solution. Has anyone else tried to use a distribution list? Successfully? Any suggestions for the user case as described above? Jaclyn Reiter, PMP, SA Project Manager, Strategic Initiatives Equifax, Inc. St. Louis, MO 314-684-2693

[BarryBu2]

I think using a document approval sent to all 8 also won't track that only one needs to give approval - the other 7 approvals will still be waiting. Have you considered creating a Workfront task level approval path and a specific task for the document review? The end user attaches the document and changes the task status to 'closed'. The status changes to 'closed - pending approval' and sends an approval request to the team. It's cleared when any one member of the approval team grants approval. Barry Buchanan Work Management Australia

[JaclynRe]

Thanks for the suggestion @Barry Buchanan . I think you're right. I'm going to pass this on to the Workfront Champion and have her start to test this functionality. Jaclyn Reiter, PMP, SA Program Manager, Strategic Initiatives Equifax, Inc. St. Louis, MO 314-684-2693

[JamesGr2]

Hi Barry, We use task level approvals. One issue we have is trying to report on these as "work" that a resource is scheduled to do. We are trying to combine tasks assigned to a resource and approvals that a resource has "assigned" to them to build a work list that we can prioritize. Just wondering how you may be doing this. James Grey Lincoln National Corporation

[JaclynRe]

I've been successful in combining tasks and issues into once column (work list) in a report, but not combining tasks and approvals. This is the article that explains that: https://experience.workfront.com/s/article/Report-Combined-Task-and-Issue-View-and-Grouping-95093847... If you're good with text mode maybe you can figure out a way to combine task and approvals. If you figure it out, I'm all ears. I might try to create an approval list report and see how far I can stretch the limits of my text mode expertise (it's not that far.) Jaclyn Reiter, PMP, SA Program Manager, Strategic Initiatives Equifax, Inc. St. Louis, MO 314-684-2693