Workflows

Workflows are a document lifecycle tool that assigns a business process to selected KnowledgeTree documents. The KnowledgeTree administrator creates and adds workflows to KnowledgeTree, based on your organizational business processes - workflows comprise a series of pre-defined states and transitions that a document must pass through before it is considered complete.

Any KnowledgeTree user may be involved in a document workflow. Some documents, such as tenders, may have complex workflows involving several people, both internal and external to your organization.

Workflows consist of 'states' and 'transitions'.

•	States - a state may be defined as a stage in a document’s life-cycle, such as billed, or draft. Each document workflow has a starting state, which is the initial state for any document in a workflow.

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Transitions - transitions define how documents move between states in the workflow. Transitions are actions that move a document to the next state. For example, an Invoice document type may start in the state 'generated', after which it may be moved by the transition 'sent to client' to the state 'billed'. Permissions may affect transitions in a workflow component called a 'guard trigger', where only users with the appropriate permissions may be allowed to perform the transition.

Workflow Effects, set up by the system administrator, are used to grant, restrict, or deny access to your KnowledgeTree documents, based on the document’s workflow state, For example, when a document reaches the relevant state, the state permissions may only allow users with the appropriate permissions to work on the document. In this example you may want to prevent documents in a Publication workflow from being checked out after they reach the state 'published'.

Notifications may also be set up as a Workflow Effect, to send notifications to selected roles or groups when the document reaches a particular state.

A document in the repository may have only one workflow attached to it at any given time. Although workflows are not automatically attached to new documents when they’re added to the repository, the administrator may configure the system to assign workflows when new documents are created, or to assign workflows only to specific documents.

You may manually assign a workflow to a document you're working on, provided you have the required permissions, and the document is not part of a workflow by default (some document types may be automatically assigned to workflows).

Note: You cannot overwrite a document's current workflow.

For more information about KnowledgeTree Workflows, and how to plan and add complete workflows, see the KnowledgeTree Administrator Manual.