Multi-Tiered Approvals and Multiple Responses

Tom,

I hope you figured out how to build a multi-tiered approval process.  We just completed an award process that required 7 different approval/denial to be routed automatically to different people.

When you add a new Workflow Dialog Component to your process click on the 'Event Configuration' tab.  The first section is called 'Start Process'.  Clicking on this elipise will bring up a WFP process.  Drop a email component into this processes.  Within the 'Contents' section of the email and the 'HTML Content' add in a element called 'ResponsePageURL or ResponsePageLink'.  Now for the To: or CC: email address you can hard code in a valid email address or if you capture that from within you process you can bring in that variable to make this email dynamic, if required.

Now, under the 'Interactive Setup' tab you can then provide the web form to allow whomever to approve/deny the process.  You can also add in logic based on the approver's decision so you can take a different route to the next approver if needed.

I would like to point 2 things out which caught us off guard.  Back within the 'Event Configuration' section you will see 'Escalation Configuration'.  This section is important so the process does not stall or stop because the approver did not complete thier work on time.  Note that the time frames are based on when the process starts.  So if you want to remind the approver 2 days, 4 days and 5 days you will need to add in seperate escalation configurations for each.  Then within these configurations you can build in logic or sent emails, etc....  Lastly, make note that at the bottom of this tab 'Event Configuration' thier is a section called 'Timeout Configuration'.  The feature by default is set to time out after 30 minutes.  If the approver, and in our case this was too short, doesn't have enough time to approve the task will expire.  Using the 'Timeout Time Span' option to increase the time frame a process will stay alive.  Different Workflow Dialog Components can have different timeout settings based on the Workflow Dialog Component requirements.

I hope this helps you with your WFP.

Thank you,
Matt

Matt,

Thanks for the input.  I'll be sure to give it a shot soon.  I haven't tried it out yet.  I actually created the workflow a different way, but seeing this, maybe I can toss it in there now too.

 Tom, have you seen this video? I talks about concurrent task creation.