Approval Requirements

When an article is submitted it may pass through an approval chain before it is published on your site.

In iCM, approval chains are known as "Approval Requirements". The ability to create and edit approval requirements is controlled by an iCM user's Management Privileges.

The users and groups who are required to approve articles need to be assigned the "Article Approvals" privilege in their Content Privileges and have at least "view" access to those articles.

Introduction

There are three different types of approval requirement.

• A user requirement means that all articles submitted by the chosen user go through an approval chain
• A group requirement means that all articles submitted by any user in the chosen user group go through an approval chain
• An article requirement means that all articles submitted by any user in this section of the article tree will go through an approval chain

Each of the three types can define a workflow the article must pass through. This can include:

• A single user who has to approve the article
• A chain of users who have to approve the article
• Any one user who is a member of a group has to approve the article
• Any one member from each group in a chain of user groups have to approve the article

These chains of workflow can be arranged in any combination. For example, a submitted article could be approved by a user's direct supervisor, then passed to the web team group, one of whom must approve the article, before finally going to a single department manager who has the final say on the article.

For more information about actually approving articles, including deleting, editing and rejecting articles, and inserting additional users into an approval chain during the approval process, see Article Approvals in the "Articles" section of this site.

Publish Immediate

The "publish immediate" content privilege allows a user to bypass all types of approval chain. Articles submitted by a user with this privilege will immediately be published to your live website.

If a user with this privilege is an approver in an approval chain, they can terminate the approval chain and make an article live by taking over responsibility for the article and publishing it in their own name. See Approving Articles for more information.

More Complex Requirements

A user and the article they submit may be subject to more than one approval requirement.

You could create an article requirement for all articles created beneath the "Latest News" article and have a user requirement set up for the user who is creating content in iCM (whichever section of the site they are working in).

The diagram below shows the order in which approval requirements will be followed when more than one exists for the same user or article.

Invalid Approvals

Users who approve articles must be able to (at least) view the article that they are to approve. If no approvers in an approval requirement can be found with sufficient article access to approve content, the approval requirement is known as an invalid approval.

While it is quite difficult to accidentally create an invalid approval requirement, it may happen if you reorganise your iCM groups and users without checking the approval requirements they are part of. When you are editing a group or user that is part of an approval requirement, iCM will display a warning to remind you, so don't ignore it!

If a group of users is set up to approve content, and some members of that group are able to approve the content and some aren't, there won't be a problem. iCM will notify those users who are able to approve the content and ignore the invalid ones.

If all users in a requirement are invalid, an email will be sent to all users with the "Article Approvals" or "Article Publish Immediate" privileges to advise them of the invalid approval requirement. The email contains the article title, so a user can log into iCM and find it.

If you retrospectively "fix" an invalid approval requirement, ie you edit your invalid users and give them access to the content they need to approve, it won't have any effect on any current articles that have dropped out of the approval requirement workflow because of an invalid requirement. Those articles will either need to be found and approved using the warning emails, or resubmitted by the author.