In one the release, a custom sequential approval workflow on document library was upgraded to make use of Publishing approval mechanism
- This enabled the process to make use of draft item security section to provision
- Check out- check in mechanism with a security filter (check out documents were shown to document author and approver alone)
- Previous approved versions of checked out document were searchable to all users
Enabling this to existing setup with live users has many challenges. And a proper release planning is required for such implementations.
This upgraded workflow and document library setting updates developed and tested well in Dev environment. This setup was to be updated to more than 6 production sites. Some discrepancies were found on these sites.
- After analysing different project sites, following facts were identified:
- Few document libraries has checked out approved document.
- One document library had minor versions of the document – which are in approved state. (this was due to document library level settings wasn’t done appropriately)
These challenges were mitigated by executing custom scripts to undo checkout and auto publish documents to major version before associating the new upgraded workflow to the document library.
SPFile object provides below methods that were useful doing this: 1. Publish ( string comment); 2. Approve ( string comment); 3. UndoCheckOut ();
We need to be cautious that this script is ran when custom workflow is configured to not allow any new workflow instances on the specific document library.
And again along with custom script building to support this task, as a part of stakeholder management, the document authors and site owners were engaged to explain the reason and communicate the actions taken on their documents as a System approved major versions.
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