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DefinitionOracleAS Portal allows you to manage and control the publishing of content on your portal through the use of approvals. When you enable approvals and notifications, OracleAS Portal provides a special privilege for approvals: Manage Items With Approval. Each item (document or file) added or modified by a user with this privilege must be approved before it is published to the portal. This prevents the publishing of items that have not been approved by the appropriate people in your organization. For example, you may want each of your company's product whitepapers to be reviewed by your legal department before they are published. Using approvals, you can easily establish an approval process that includes the legal department as one of the required approvers. This ensures that each author of a whitepaper cannot publish their document to the portal until it is approved.
An approval process is a series of one or more approval routing steps. Each routing step includes one or more users and/or groups (approvers) who must approve an item before it is published. Routing to the approvers can be in serial (one at a time) or in parallel (all at once). Each step can be defined to require a response by any one approver or by all approvers.
The approval process begins when a user with the Manage Items with Approval privilege adds or modifies an item on a page. The item is automatically checked out of the portal (so that it cannot be modified), and routed through the approval process based on how the approval process is defined. (See "Defining the approval process" for more information.) Once the required number of responses is received during a step, the process continues to the next step. The approval process ends when the final step is reached and the document is approved by the last required approver. The approval process also ends when any approver rejects the item.
There are many reasons to use approval processes. Maybe your company is trying to eliminate the costs of a paper-driven office in which hard copy documents requiring approvals, such as expense reports and travel requests, create bottlenecks for your workers. Perhaps you want to control what is published on your portal, and you want to ensure that items are reviewed before they are published. When you define approval processes, you allow the appropriate people in your organization to receive notification of pending items requiring approval, to review the items, and to approve or reject the items, all from your company's portal.
You can enable approval processes in OracleAS Portal at the page or page group level. (Page groups contain a hierarchy of pages and sub-pages for organizing content.) You can establish approval processes that are unique to individual pages, or you can create one approval process for the entire page group.
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After you enable approvals for your portal, you can define the approval process for the page group or define the approval process for the page. An approval process consists of one or more steps in which a newly created or updated item must be approved before it can be published. When a step in the approval process includes multiple users and/or groups, you can specify whether:
After a user with the "Manage Items with Approval" privilege adds or modifies an item, approvers in the approval process receive a message in the My Notifications portlet indicating that an item requires an approval.
Note: A user with the Manage or Manage Content privilege on a page can copy an item to another page on which he or she has the "Manage Items with Approval" privilege. However, the copied item must be approved before it displays on the page.
Approval notifications are sent to the list of approvers identified in an approval process step. An approver may respond to the notification by approving or rejecting the item in question.
The My Notifications portlet also displays notifications for item expiry and subscriptions. The user can click the subject of the notification to display its details.
When there is an item that requires approval, the approver receives a notification in the My Notifications portlet. The approver must decide whether to approve or reject the item. If the approver approves the item, a notification is sent to the next approver in the approval process. If the approver is the final approver in the approval process, the item will be published to the portal after it is approved. The approver may also decide to reject the item. If the item is rejected, the approval process is halted even if there are remaining steps (approvers). After the approver approves or rejects the item, the notification is removed from the My Notifications portlet.
Approvers can click the item's subject link in the My Notifications portlet to display the Approval Notification Details page. From this page, the approver can view the item, enter comments, and decide whether to approve or reject the item. The approver can also view the approval history of the item.
Approvers can also use the Pending Items Preview mode to approve or reject an item directly on the page. To access this mode, click the item's page link in the My Notifications portlet.
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The My Approval Status portlet tracks the item's progression through the approval process from the submitter's point of view. It essentially tells the user whether the item is still pending, or whether it has been approved or rejected. After a user with the "Manage Items with Approval" privileges adds or modifies an item, the user's My Approval Status portlet displays a new entry for the item with a "pending" status. (The item is not visible on the page until it is approved.) Only the current approver and the user who created the item can view the pending item in the My Approval Status portlet. After the item is approved or rejected, the user's My Approval Status portlet displays "Approved" or "Rejected" for the item.
If you are the creator of an item that becomes rejected, the item will appear in your My Approval Status portlet with a "Rejected" status. Also, when you view the page that includes the item using Pending Items Preview mode, you will see that the item was rejected. You, as the item creator, can then edit the rejected item from the Pending Items: Preview mode. After the item is edited, the item is resubmitted for approval.
Note: All actions performed on the rejected item appear in the approval history for the item.
A rejected item can be deleted by the item creator, the page group administrator, or a page or content manager (with the Manage or Manage Content privilege on the page). The item's status changes to "Deleted". A rejected item that was deleted can be un-deleted. When you un-delete a rejected item, the item's status changes back to "Rejected".
Note: Rejected items that are deleted will be purged when all other deleted items are purged in the page group.
As mentioned above, the item creator can edit a rejected item so that the item can be resubmitted for approval. Page group administrators can also edit rejected items; they have special privileges that permit them to edit rejected items directly. For example, a page group administrator may want to incorporate comments in an item that is pending approval. The administrator can reject the item, note comments in the item's approval history (such as the changes that will be incorporated), and edit the item. The item, at this point, is still a rejected item. However, after the item creator reviews the page group administrator's changes, and updates the item again, the item becomes a pending item. The item is then directed through its approval process.
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InformationFor more information go to the documentation section of Portal Center.
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