SP2010 Custom Workflow Design

Question

I have to create a custom workflow on a document library for a group of users, and I'm having trouble figuring out how to go about creating it. The document library has the following extra columns: Last Review Date, Next Review Date, Reviewer, Approver. The following are the workflow steps:

1. Using an Information Management Policy, start the workflow on a document at Next Review Date - 1 month
2. Send an alert to the reviewer that the document is up for review
3. Wait for the reviewer to finish
4. Once the review is complete, notify the editor (a defined person for all documents) that a reviewed document is ready for final editing
5. Wait for the editor to finish
6. Notify the approver that the document is ready for final approval
7. Once approved, update the Last Review Date and Next Review Date fields.

I'm guessing I want to turn content approval on for the document library, using both major and minor versions. Updating the fields with the workflow is simple enough. Mostly, it's just tracking what stage the workflow is in, and how the users can update when their stage is complete.

Anyone have any suggestions for me? Prefer to keep this to a designer based workflow, but I can do it with VS2010 if need be.

Answer 1

You can take care of this easily with a SharePoint Designer workflow and a customized Approval Task Process or Custom Task Process activity. SharePoint workflows are organized around creating tasks for users for the various review steps and approvals, and you will need to associate a column with the workflow to keep track of the current status of the workflow (divide into a set of steps).

I don't think you necessarily need to use content approval (which is really designed more for content publishing) but you certainly can use it if you want to.