SharePoint Use Cases

At Stump the Panel forum of End User SharePoint Maurice asked:

I have a bunch of documents that need to be audited every six months. This their a way that a reminder can be set up to remind the owner of the document that its time to review the document?

Laura Rogers suggested the following for Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007:

If you have MOSS, you can use the information management policy settings in the document library. You can set it to: Modified Date + 6 months. Then, make it kick off a workflow at that point. Use an OOB one, or create your own “review” workflow that will “Collect data from a user” in the workflow.

Maurice is using WSS so here is a solution how you could do it on top of WSS.

Prerequisites

Create a document library. Turn on versioning, require check-ins and content approval. To create this custom workflow you will need SharePoint Designer.

Workflow model

To achieve the desired behavior we will be using the following workflow:

Auditing documents workflow model

Creating workflow model

1.       Fire-up your SharePoint designer and open your web site

2.       Select File > New > Workflow

3.       Create a workflow with the following settings (choose your document library)

Defining a new workflow with SharePoint Designer

4.       Click Next and configure the workflow as shown on figure below

Configuring workflow steps

There are four actions in this step: After pausing for 180 days, workflow updates the approval status for a document to Pending and assigns a Audit Review task to the responsible user. Once this task is completed document status is changed back to Approved.

The change of approval status in the final step will fire another instance of this same workflow and the entire process will start over.

Document library with Audit Review workflow

In this post I used the defaul Approval status column, but you can create a custom column and custom status to track workflow stage.