Workflow can help you control your content - photo by muha...

When managing many sites and many webmasters it is important to maintain control of your content. At the FCO we have over 250 websites and 300 webmasters. It is impossible to keep track of all these sites and webmasters ourselves but workflow allows us to control access to creating and publishing content.

Wikipedia provides a good definition of workflow – “A workflow is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.”

When combined with user access restrictions, workflow can give you peace of mind that content is being created, edited, reviewed and published by the right groups of people.

Here are my golden rules for designing a web workflow…

1. Workflow is an interpretation of the required business processes. You must fully understand the business processes required before you attempt to interpret them into a technical workflow solution.
2. Keep it as simple as possible – editors and managers need to understand how it works.
3. Make it adaptable – a single workflow should be able to adapt to all required editorial processes.

In my experience a simple 4 step workflow can cover almost any combination of business processes

This is a circular workflow from new through to archived and then back to new.

New – This is the status at which content is created and edited. Members of this group are able to create new content and pass to review status.

Review – At this status a manager can review the content and either pass it through to published status or reject it back to the new status.

Published – At this stage content is live on the website. From this status content can be pushed to archived status, this will remove the content from the live site. Alternatively, an editor can move the content back to new status. This means the content will remain live on the site while changes are made.  The page is then passed back through workflow to published therefore replacing the original content.

Archived – Once moved to this stage content is removed from the website. This content can then be edited and pushed back through workflow to published status.

Hopefully this will give you a bit or a head start when planning access to your content.

Comments welcome!