PointBeyond

Part 1: Content Approval

I often get asked for advice on how to set up the approvals in MOSS. While this is simple enough, there are some subtleties that you need to be consider if you want to get the most from it.

First of all, you need to be aware that there are two approval mechanisms. These are “Content Approval” and “Approval Workflow”. The first of these is the simpler, and it often meets requirements without the need for an actual workflow. The workflow is more powerful, but is more complex. The workflow mechanism can interact with the simpler content approval mechanism.

In this first article we’ll look simply at content approval, as we need to get a handle on this before considering the approval workflow.

In the second article we’ll look at the approval workflow.

Recommended Setup

If you’re just looking for instructions on how to set approval up, my recommendations are given below.

Content approval of documents and web pages is best combined with major and minor versioning, and requiring documents to be checked out. Unapproved versions are then given minor version numbers, and when a document is approved it is given a major version.

The versioning configuration of your document library should look as follows:

Depending on your situation you may want to limit the number of versions that are retained. This setting won’t affect the behaviour described below.

Users who are able to edit items should be added to the appropriate SharePoint group such as “Members”. Users who are to approve items must be added to the “Approvers” group.

For the rest of this article, I have assumed that the above configuration is in use, although I do cover what happens without versioning at the end.

Content Approval in SharePoint – the Details

You can configure a list (such as a document library or the pages library of a publishing site) to require content approval. What does this mean? It effectively adds another column to your list named “Approval Status”.

With these settings in place, when a user updates an item the status is “Draft”.

Users can submit the item for approval, either

1. when they check it in
2. by selecting “Publish a Major Version”:
3. or for web pages, by pressing the button on the editing toolbar:

This updates the  status to “Pending”.

Users now get the option to “Approve/reject” the item.

Only users who are in the “Approvers” SharePoint group are able to approve or reject the item. Any other user that attempts this will get an access denied message.

For web pages SharePoint displays “Approve” and “Reject” buttons in the page toolbar. These buttons are only visible to members of the approvers group.

Finally, it is possible to have content approval with only major versioning or without versioning at all. If this is done then any changes to an item result in the approval setting going straight to “Pending”, ie there is no “Draft” status and no concept of “Publish a major version”. The “Submit for Approval” button on a publishing page will look slightly different as it also performs a page check in.

In part 2 we will take a look at using the approvals workflow.

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