Tech Tip: E-mail Notification Schedules
November 10th, 2008 Comment on this articleAfter routing a document to a user or group, Workflow 8 enables you to configure an e-mail notification schedule that will remind the trustee to process the document. For example, a workflow routes an employee’s vacation request to an HR representative, then sends the HR employee e-mail reminders to approve/deny the request. The reminders are sent according to a custom notification schedule defined in the Workflow Designer. This feature ensures that trustees don’t delay a workflow indefinitely by failing to process a document.
You can configure the notification schedule in the following ways.
- Initial wait. How long the workflow should wait after routing the document before sending the first notification e-mail.
- Wait time. The amount of time to wait between each e-mail.
- Count. Total number of e-mails that should be sent.
- Exclude weekends and holidays. Whether the above settings should take into account holidays and weekends.
How do I use this feature?
The following Workflow 8 activities can take advantage of this feature: Route Entry to Folder, Route Entry to Group, and Route Entry to User. After adding one of these activities to your workflow, select the activity in the Workflow Designer and click the E-mail button in the Properties Pane: 
. In the Routing Activity Options dialog box, select the E-mail tab. Configure the options shown in the screenshot below.
Custom Weekends and Holidays
By default, non-workdays include Saturday and Sunday. You can define different and/or additional non-work days by opening the Workflow Administration Console and expanding the Holidays node.
Click the Weekend Days node to configure the days of the week that should be considered part of the weekend.
Click the Official Holidays node to configure annual holidays that should be observed. For convenience, the following holidays have been created for you, but note that they are not active until you configure them.
Tags: Workflow