AX2730

About workflow stages and owner assignments

Each workflow consists of one or more stages that plan files progress through. For each stage, each plan file is assigned a stage owner to be responsible for the plan file while it is in that stage. Stage owners can be individual users or roles.

There are two types of stages:

• Edit stage: Owners of edit stages have read/write access to plan files, and can save plan data to the database. It is assumed that users will be developing plans and making changes to plan files. Users can submit their files to the next stage, but cannot send files back to the prior stage.
• Review stage: Owners of review stages have read-only access to plan files, unless read/write access is explicitly granted for the stage. It assumed that users will be reviewing the plan files, and then either approving them to send the files to the next stage, or rejecting them to send the files back to the prior stage.

For each defined stage in the workflow, each plan file is assigned a user or a role as the stage owner. If a user is the owner of the current stage for a plan file, then:

• The user has a current workflow "task" to edit or review the plan file. This task displays in the user's Workflow pane, and the user is notified of the task via email.
• The user is the only user who can complete the task and submit, approve, or reject the plan file (depending on the type of stage). Administrators can override ownership and manually move plan files to different stages, but in that case the existing task is not considered to be "completed" — the existing task is simply deleted and a new task is issued.

If a role is assigned as the stage owner, then potentially multiple users within the role can be assigned the workflow task. Any of these users can submit, approve, or reject the file. If changes are made to the role membership or to access settings while the plan file is in that stage, the task assignments will update accordingly. For more information on how security settings determine which users in the role become stage owners, see About workflow and plan file security.

NOTE: Being the stage owner does not mean that the user is the only person who has rights to edit the file. Administrators can always edit the file, and any user who has Read/Write or higher rights in Security can edit the file.

If a plan file does not have an assigned owner for a specific stage, then that stage is skipped and the plan file is moved to the next stage for which it has an assigned owner. If a plan file does not have any assigned owners for all stages, then the plan file is inactive within the workflow.

When assigning a stage owner to a plan file, you can select a specific user or role, or you can use a dynamic assignment. For example, you can specify a lookup column to look up the ownership assignment from a reference table, or you can specify that the creator of the plan file is the owner. You can also specify a default owner for the stage, to be used by default unless the plan file has a specific assignment. If you use a dynamic option, the actual stage owner is determined dynamically when the plan file enters the stage, based on the selected option.