Modifying the start behavior of Publishing Workflow in MOSS 2007

Question

I am currently building out a collaboration portal that will be used for document management. Part of the requirements were to create mny OOTB approval workflows. Each workflow is set to start off publishing. Here is the easy. The customer was under assumption that when publish was selected, the workflow will just process accordingly. This is not the case. AN initiation form appears and the user must choose start from the form. Can this be bypassed? For instance we just want the workflow to trigger. I advised that we could run automatically off if new items created/edited but they want it to run off of publish automatically.

Paul

Answer 1

I think you are going to need some form of customization:

• a custom event receiver or workflow that checks the publishing status on change and then starts the OOB approval workflow

• a custom approval workflow that combines the behavior, exiting if change was not a change in publishing

Answer 2

Yes, this can be bypassed. If you use "simple publishing", no assocation form will show in which you specify who should approve the document / page. Any user who is not in the approvers role (group) and in the contributors role will be able to create content, but will only see a "checkin for approval" button, any person in the approvers group will be able to actually approve the content for publication, they will see an approve / reject button. However, unless the user has an alert on the list to notify him if any content needs approval he or she won't know he needs to approve something.

These are list level settings.