How many people have actually used any of the MOSS out of box workflows beyond "Approval"? I am guessing some people have kicked the tires on maybe "Collect Feedback". I had a customer recently ask me what happens when a "Disposition Approval" workflow that is launched in a record center on expiration is rejected? I honestly have no clue as I have never tried! Time to kick the tires…
FYI…a basic live.com search yields the following link to walk you through the basics: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101544291033.aspx
Ok, so how would you attack this? Right…go to a document library, create a "Disposition Approval" workflow and kick-off manually on any document. I guess my first surprise here occurred when I created the workflow as there was no serial/parallel nor people/group selection at all. From my understanding from the link above this is by design due to the fact that the workflow is really meant to be executed on expiration of content in a record center. The idea there is that the record manager would be the only person or one of a few people that would have access to the task list for approving or rejecting. (Mental note: Record Center managers should be the only one with access to even view the task list in a record center) Have a gander at the following screenshot showing the workflow task created (no one assigned):
When you click on the task itself, the following is the InfoPath Form Services form for approval/rejection that is presented (of course I deleted just to see what would happen and I retained the item's metadata in the audit log just for yucks and giggles):
When complete I am presented with the following workflow status screen:
So where are the metadata items at in this audit log? Let's look, shall we…navigate up to the site collection Site Settings and select "Audit log reports". Take a look under the Information Management Policy Reports section and select "Expiration and Disposition" to pull up an Excel report. In the report you will need to open Pivot Table/Options tab and click on the Field List and select "Event Data" to add as a column. After that, there's your metadata and detailed information on the disposition…pretty cool!:
All seems pretty straight-forward, beyond the non-task-assigning aspect. So back to my customer's original question…what happens if you hit an expiration date on a record in a record center, the disposition workflow kicks off and the record manager selects "Do not delete this item"? Well you are just going to have to wait like me for my 1 day expiration to kick off. J