SharePoint 2010 Records Management Implementation – Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog, I provided details on the following:

1.Configuration of retention stages (for records) in the Content Type’s Information management policy and Content Type Syndication.

2.Configuration of Records Center/Content Organizer rules.

3.Configuration of Send To connection.

In Part 2, I will provide details on the following:

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1.Approval process.

2.Issues encountered and workarounds

Approval Process

Per the requirements, the document submitted to the Records Vault site needs to be approved by 2 Approvers. If the 1^st Approver approves the document, it must be routed to the 2^nd Approver. And if the 2^nd Approver approves the document, it must be declared as a record.If the 1^st Approver rejects the document, then the workflow is stopped, the document is not routed to the 2^nd Approver, and it must be deleted. If the 2^nd Approver rejects the document, then the workflow is stopped, and the document must be deleted. In addition, e-mail notifications must contain the rejection comments entered by the Approvers.

I created a SharePoint Designer reusable workflow (new feature in SharePoint 2010) to implement the approval process. Reusable workflows can be associated with content types or Lists. When a reusable workflow is associated with a content type or list, it can run on all items in that list, or all items of that content type.

The workflow uses the Start Approval Process action (new Action in SharePoint 2010). See Figure 1 below. This Action includes the entire approval framework and in addition, contains pre-built approval process logic, and forms. The out-of-the-box Approval workflow in SharePoint 2010 also uses this same action.

Figure 1
This action creates tasks and sends e-mail notifications to Approvers. You don’t have to create these Actions, since the Start Approval Process automatically does this for you. The Approvers can then review the Tasks assigned to them and either Approve or Reject the Task. If the Task is approved by the 1^st Approver, then another Start Approval Process is created for the 2^nd Approver. If both Approvers approve the document, the document is declared as a record. I used the Declare Record Action (new in SharePoint 2010) to implement this. See Figure 2 below.

Figure 2
I captured the rejection comments, entered by Approvers, by changing the behavior of a single task, in the Start Approval Process action. See Figure 3 below.

Figure 3
I changed the behavior of the “When a Task Completes” Task, by adding a local workflow variable (type: string) called rejectionComments in the Else if portion shown below. See Figure 4 below.

Figure 4
Figure 5 below shows how to access the “Comments” field from the Approval Task.

Figure 5
 

I was then able to add the rejectionComments variable in the body of the e-mail message, and this captured the rejection comments entered by the user.

Issues Encountered and Workarounds

We ran into the following 2 issues in the Records Management project:

1.Unable to automatically trigger SharePoint Designer workflow attached to a retention stage (using the Start a Workflow action) in the information management policy of a Content type.

2.Unable to automatically trigger SharePoint Designer workflow on newly created items that were routed to the appropriate document library by the Content Organizer.

The workaround for both these issues, was to manually start the SharePoint Designer workflows.