We have already created a custom lifecycle and associated it with our custom News Article object type in Chapters 11 and 12. This means that content created from the News Article object type (and template) can be routed through the different states of the lifecycle, such as WIP, Staging, and Approved. Have you ever thought about how content automatically progresses through the different lifecycle states? You can certainly select content items and manually promote, demote or power-promote them to move them across various linear lifecycle states. However, in an actual scenario your business users would want an automated process to achieve this. What the business teams typically want is a controlled and automated mechanism whereby content created by a group of users can be sent across electronically to a reviewer group for an initial round of review. The number of sequential/parallel groups of reviewers or approvers could be specific to a particular business. Once the content is finally reviewed and approved, it should be made available on the live website and should be in the terminal lifecycle state (say Approved/Active). At any point of time during the review and approval process, the content should be in the intermediate lifecycle states such as WIP or Staging.

This automated business process required to route content through its numerous lifecycle stages before publishing it to the production website is termed workflow in Documentum lingo.

A workflow goes hand in hand with a lifecycle and defines business policies for teams by having the content creators and reviewers adhere to the norms laid down by the organization.

Note that while a lifecycle simply defines the different stages in the life of a content item, a workflow actually defines how content moves through these different stages, who makes it move under various activities, what actions are performed by individual groups and users during the different activities, etc.

In Documentum, a workflow template is used to create various workflow instances (dm_workflow) for routing content in lifecycle stages and exists in the Docbase as a dm_process object. The Documentum Workflow Manager tool used to create and manage workflow templates is available once you install/configure Documentum Application Builder. (Please refer to Chapter 8 for further details.)

You could create a custom workflow as per your specific business needs or use one of the following workflows available out-of-the-box in Web Publisher:

Launch Documentum Application Builder and open the WebPublisher DocApp under /System/Applications/WebPublisher to view the default Web Publisher workflows as shown in figure 19.1.

Figure 19.1: Workflow templates available by default in Web Publisher

Double-clicking on the above workflow templates launches the Workflow Manager tool and displays the workflow process definition in the form of a GUI layout.