After routing an entry to a user or group, Workflow 8 can notify the trustee that a document was routed to their working folder. If the user/group does not take the appropriate action on the entry (e.g., approve/deny or process the entry) within a specified amount of time, the workflow can send a series of reminder e-mails based on a recurring e-mail schedule that observes weekends and holidays.

For example, it is Joan’s job to process sales orders. A workflow is configured to perform the following actions:

• Route orders to Joan’s working folder.
• Send Joan an initial notification e-mail informing her she has a new order to process.
• Wait three days and then send a series of reminder e-mails once every 48 hours until Joan processes the order. The recurring e-mail schedule will not take into account weekends or standard United States holidays.

Creating the Workflow

Follow these steps to create a workflow that performs the actions described in the example above.

1. In the Workflow Designer, add a Route Entry to Folder, Route Entry to Group, or Route Entry to User activity to your workflow.
2. Configure the activity to route to a specific user, group, or folder.
3. In the E-mail tab, create a new e-mail.
4. Select Create an e-mail recurrence schedule.
5. Next to Initial wait, specify how long the activity should wait before sending the first e-mail.
6. Next to Wait time, specify how long the activity should wait between e-mails before sending another.
7. Next to Count, specify the total number of e-mails that should be sent.
8. Select Exclude weekends and holidays if the activity should not take into account non-workdays when determining when to send the next e-mail. You can define what days are considered weekends and holidays in the Workflow 8 Administration Console.
9. In the Wait Conditions tab, add a wait condition. This is required for the e-mail recurrence schedule to work.

Defining Weekends and Holidays

Follow these steps to specify which days are considered weekends and holidays.

1. In the Workflow 8 Administration Console, connect to and select a Workflow Server.
2. Expand the Holidays node.
3. Select the Weekend Days node.
4. By default, Saturday and Sunday are recognized as weekends. To modify this setting, right-click the Weekend Days node and select Edit Weekend Days.
5. Select the Official Days node.
6. Workflow 8 includes the following holidays: Easter, Chinese New Year, Memorial Day, Christmas Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, New Year’s Day, and Independence Day. By default, these holidays will not be observed. To observe a specific holiday, right-click it, select Properties, and select Observed.

• Note: You can also modify a holiday by right-clicking it and selecting Properties.

7. To add a new holiday, right-click the Official Days node and select New Holiday.

Tags: Workflow

Posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 3:49 pm under Support. You can comment on this post.