Approval in workspace – Business Online

Introduction

In a company or project workspace in the system, it may be necessary to run an internal approval of a document before it is distributed externally. This includes documents in subcomponents of companies such as opportunities and contracts.

In the document library of the components below, there is support for sending any document in the library to a workflow, whether it is a peer review or a procedural approval of a document distributed to a client.

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Approval of workspace documents is not supported within personnel workspaces or QHSE report pages.

Workflow

The workflow is a simple one-step approval where you define an approver who either approves or rejects a document. If the document is approved, it will be published in approved documents.

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Document Responsible

The document responsible is the person who starts the workflow. To start the workflow, find the option "Start approval process" in the document's dropdown menu.

After clicking the menu option, a panel for approval details will appear on the right side of the screen. Here you can define who should approve the document and add a comment to the approver. After approval, an email and a Teams notification will be distributed to the approver, as well as a task on their my page.

When the approver has taken action on the document (approved or rejected), the document responsible will receive an email and a Teams notification.

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You cannot start a workflow for items that are still open for editing.

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Use the "Cancel workflow" option to withdraw the workflow. This will remove the approval task and notify the approver.

Approver

The approver is the one who receives the approval task from the user who is document responsible. The approval panel can be opened via a link from the email or Teams notifications, or the approval task on My Page.

The approval page will display a number of details about the document at the top and the actions you can perform below.

Field	Description
Document title	Title of the document with a link to open the file sent for approval.
Release date	The date the document was sent for approval.
Document responsible	The user who sent the document for approval.
Revision number	Current revision of the document. If approved, this will increase by 1.
Version	The version of the document when it was sent for approval.
Document responsible comment	The comment sent to the approver by the user who started the approval workflow
Action selected	An option for the approver to decide whether the document should be approved or rejected
Publish format	An option for the approver to decide in which format the document should be published. If you select Original, the document will be published in the current document type.

After submitting the form, the document responsible will be notified via email and Teams notification about your action. The document you approved will continue to have its approval fields updated, and the document will be published in the Approved documents library of the original workspace.

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When you hover over the triangle next to "Publish format", you will be informed that the publish format cannot be changed after the first approval. To publish a document in another format, you must create a new document with the same content and publish it.

Fields in the document library

The document library contains a number of fields related to the approval status of the document.

Field	Description
Name	The name of the document
Title	Document title
Document number	SharePoint document library's unique identifier for the document.
Version	SharePoint version of the document (for internal use)
Revision	Current approved revision of the document (for external use).
Approval status	Notes the current status of the document in the workflow.
Modified	The date and time when the document was last changed.
Modified by	The user who last changed the document.

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The Title field gets an auto-generated title when the document is created from the folder structure logic, or when the document is copied using the cd-files component. To change the title, click "New title" in the document's dropdown menu.

Document number

This is the standard SharePoint document number. It is constructed as follows:

[Custom string] - [Workspace ID] - [workspace document counter]

The custom string is a configuration on the site and the same for the entire system. In our case, it is DUID.

The workspace ID is an automatically generated unique alphanumeric string. This number remains the same for all documents within the same workspace.

The workspace document counter is a number from 1-X within the current workspace and increases each time a new document is created within the same workspace.

Example: DUID-1934734584-17

Version

The version field is the standard versioning tool in SharePoint. It operates in minor and major versions, where minor versions represent changes to the document or document properties, and the major version represents a published version. For each publication of major versions, the minor version is reset to 0.

Version history is available for any document via the dropdown menu.

Revision

The revision field is the last published major version. The published major version is the version of the document that was approved in peer review and may have been distributed externally. Documents with a revision number will have their published version placed in the approved documents library.

Approval status

This field will contain the current approval status of the document.

Draft - The document is being edited and the current version is not approved.

Pending approval - The document has been sent for review but has not yet been approved

Approved - The document is approved and has been published in Approved documents

Rejected - The document was rejected after being sent for approval

Approved documents

The approved documents library is where all published documents end up in their published format. The original document can continue to be worked on without affecting the approved document.