Hello,
I have a question regarding management of office documents.
Imagine a document that has two stages or maturity levels like "draft" and "final version".
Both draft and final versions undergo an approval process. At first user creates the document and it has the stage draft. The user edits the document via check in and check out and when he has finished, he puts it into an approval workflow. The document gets released after approval and the user creates a new version chain (=version increases to 2.0 and lifecycle stage changes back to working) and works on the same document again, but this time it will be the final version. After completing his work, user puts the final version into the same approval workflow and the final version gets approved.
Given this situation I want to manage all this document creation process by using soft attribute to express stages "draft" and "final version", version like 1.0 or 2.0 and life cycle status like working or released.
It would look like this:
1) Initial document creation
Stage: Draft
Version: 1.0
Lifecycle: working
2) Daily check in and check out
Stage: Draft
Version: 1.xxxx
Lifecycle: working
3) Approval "Draft"
Stage: Draft
Version: 1.xxxx
Lifecycle: released
4) New version chain and stage change
Stage: Final version
Version: 2.0
Lifecycle: working
5) Daily check in and check out
Stage: Final version
Version: 2.xxxx
Lifecycle: working
6) Approal "final version"
Stage: Final version
Version: 2.xxxx
Lifecycle: released
My question is:
Would that be common practice to manage the STAGE of a document in a soft attribute like i have outlined above? Or would it be better to manage everything with the life cycle status. In such a case I would have to define more life cycle states like "Approved Draft" and "Approved Final Version" and I need two workflows, because I can not use the same WF for Draft and Final version.
What is your experience?