Laserfiche Workflow 8.4 will have new activities that can keep your repository up-to-date, organized and clutter free by retrieving and deleting shortcuts.

A best practice for keeping an organized repository is to route shortcuts and keep the original document safe in one folder or in a records management series. With Laserfiche Workflow, you have always been able to route shortcuts, but the upcoming shortcut activities will allow you to modify and delete those shortcuts just as easily.

Note: Since this is a preview, the details and appearances of certain elements may change between now and the Laserfiche Workflow 8.4 release.

Retrieve Shortcuts Activity

This new activity gathers all the shortcuts to a specified document and makes those shortcuts available to the workflow. Pairing this activity with a For Each Entry activity lets you make changes to each shortcut in turn, such as renaming or redistributing the shortcut.

Example: When the name of a document changes, Mark wants to update the names of all the document’s shortcuts to match. Because the shortcuts are scattered across the repository, tracking them down and manually changing their names would be tedious and time consuming. Mark uses a Retrieve Shortcut activity to find all the shortcuts to the renamed document, and then he places a Rename Entry activity inside a For Each Entry activity so that each of the shortcuts is given the new name in turn.

Delete Shortcuts Activity

With the new Delete Shortcuts activity, you can quickly clear any unnecessary or old shortcuts out of your repository.

For instance, you can use this activity to delete any shortcuts a workflow creates that are no longer needed when the workflow finishes:

Example: A workflow routes a shortcut to an applicant’s resume to the recruiting director, the department head and the regional manager. If the applicant is rejected, the Delete Shortcuts activity deletes all the shortcuts to the resume. The activity ensures that these individual’s folders are not cluttered with shortcuts to rejected resumes.

Additionally, this activity can be used as a handy tool for periodically cleaning your repository:

Example: You create a workflow that runs on a schedule each month. The workflow is a collection of Delete Shortcut activities that remove the shortcuts to the folders containing contracts that expired in the last month. This workflow ensures that employees do not accidentally follow a shortcut to an outdated contract.