Approval in a Provisioning Workflow

[ctearney]

Has anyone inserted an Approval step into a Provisioning workflow? The reason I ask is that we have a process flow for the business which requires the initial approval, which is handled by the traditional Approval Workflow, but when the Provisioning Workflow triggers we want only certain actions to take place before the workflow pauses and waits for the business user to "approve" before continuing on.

We looked at the use of the watch option that you can do with TASKS as this works well for pausing the workflow, however, we don't know of a way that would allow the business client to easily trigger the closure of that task. We also looked at inserting the approval step within the provisioning workflow but were unable to get it to be recognized by the workflow.

Can Service Desk allow for the closure of Tasks/Tickets by the client if they respond to the email that received when the ticket was created? I know Email Robot will update the Task if an email is replied to but what about closing the ticket?

Is there a way to make the Approval step in the provisioning workflow work if the approvers are static (i.e. will always be the same names/accounts)?

[Hendrik_Ambrosius]

Never tried the approval-in-provisioning-WF-thing. And my guess is: does not work.

But I can probably help you with the second approach.

The sample WF attached checks the status of a task every 10 sec.
If the user responds to the task by email, his account is linked to it, so I can check for the AttachedUsers property and close the task.

It´s not perfect because it closes the task even if the user answers "I can´t do it", but maybe it can be enhanced.

[ctearney]

Thank you for that Hendrik, apologies for the delayed reply. We are testing it out now and share what we end up with.

[Momo]

Thank you for your help, Hendrik! I added your suggestions, and it is working.

However, there is one thing I wanted to note. While this is working, it did break some of the emails we already had in place within the workflow. For example, we have some notification emails that go out towards the end of the workflow. Those emails still get sent out but won't display the text in the subject line or body even though they are correct in the workflow. In order to fix this, I had to recreate and/or resave the emails in the workflow. Once that was done, they would send with the correct information. I was able to resolve but wanted to make you are aware in case anyone runs into this in the future.

I also wanted to mention that I was able to get this to partially work using a specific word reply with the following variable asql expression "CASE WHEN T(SPSActivityClassUnitOfWork).OriginalSolution LIKE '%I approve%' THEN 'Resume' ELSE NULL END" instead of using attached user. The flow would then look for 'Resume' string for this variable before closing the pause task. But this method would only work if the user replied with the specific word quickly and then it would still cause formatting issues with the existing emails in the workflow like with the attached user method. If the user took too long to respond, the task would not close.

Hope all of that makes sense. Again, thank you for your help with this! Currently we have it working using the attached user method, so we are very grateful. If you have any questions or would like more details on the issues found, please let us know.

[Hendrik_Ambrosius]

Great feedback, very useful. Thank you.