Issues on Sharepoint Designer Approval Workflow

In this post we introduce how to use Sharepoint Designer for Approval Workflow. But there are some issues on this way.

Issues on Sharepoint Designer Approval Workflow

1. Need to be familiar on Sharepoint Designer

As Sharepoint Designer is not included in standard office suite, it needs to be separately downloaded and installed on PC. It requires to conntect to Sharepoint Server, choose list and choose or create new workflow, which is not much difficult though, requires some days for new people to get familliar with it.

2. Workflow configuration is not very visible

As we introduced, workflow variable needs to be used when the approver or departments needs to be set from the content of request. That will be already excess the standard IT knowledge level of business worker and requires the way of thinking of IT engineer or programmers. If those kind of workflow mainteined by business people, and those people left or move within organization, it is almost very hard for new people to understand existing workflow, especially the variables within workflow specifies what kind of value. It is always headache for IT support department to handle those kind of help.

3.  Permission issue

The biggest and may be critical for certain case is that permission is not controlled by Sharepoint designer workflow. This means 1. approver can edit the request body before or even after the approval. 2. Anybody who know the link can approve the request and also can change the comment or other content after approval. These behavior are usually not preferable, but it may very hard to overcome this issue with Sharpeoint designer standard function (requires impersonal step with 2010 workflow)

Sharepoint Add-in(s) to overcome those issues

Many company chose to introduce Sharepoint workflow add-in as Sharepoint Designer itself still has issues above, which still remains for Sharepoint 2013 and Sharpeoint online. MoriApps Simple Workflow is the one which provide easy and quick creation of Sharepoint approval workflow. It is free for standard function and designed for simple requirements and even for business users.