Applies to SharePoint Employee Training Management
It’s pretty easy to configure an approval workflow on enrollments in the Employee Training Management, especially if you use SharePoint Server. SharePoint Server includes a Publishing Approval Workflow you can use for this purpose. In this post I will describe how to configure an approval workflow which automatically approves enrollments in trainings that are free of charge and which only requires approval for trainings with costs.
First of all you have to create a new currency site column. Name it “Costs” and add it to the lists “Training Catalog”, “Scheduled Trainings” and “Enrollments”. In the “Training Catalog” and the “Scheduled Trainings” lists you also have to add the field to the content types “Topic” and “Training”. In the Enrollments list we don’t do that, there we only want to display the costs defined in the topic or training. Fortunately, Employee Training Management does that for you. If a field exists in the Enrollments list and in the Training Catalog or the Scheduled Trainings list (same internal name), the value is synchronized from the training or topic to the enrollment.
Next edit the Enrollments list in SharePoint Designer.
Now add a new workflow and name it “Approve Enrollment”.
First you have to add an IF condition. If costs are greater than 0 (or greater than a certain limit).
Continue with the ELSE branch.
If the training is free of charge we can approve the enrollment. That means in the else branch you only have to set the content approval status to approved.
In the IF branch you have to add an approval process.
Click on “these users” to configure the approver and the task request.
In this example I use one particular user as the approver for all enrollment. You can also insert actions before this one to collect information from the user or insert the “Lookup manager for user” action and configure the outcome as the approver of the enrollment.
Before the approval process you have to set the workflow variable “EnableContentApproval” to yes. This is important because otherwise the approval status won’t be changed on workflow completion.
That’s it, now you have configured a really simple approval workflow.
Publish the workflow and run a few tests with free trainings and trainings with costs.
