To
manually start a workflow on a list item or file, select the item’s or
file’s row in the list or library view to switch to the Documents ribbon
or Items ribbon. If there is at least one workflow associated with the
document library that allows you to manually start it, the Workflows
button is available in the ribbon (see Figure 1).
Clicking this button
opens the Workflows screen, which has options for starting a workflow
associated with the list or document library on the specific item (see Figure 2).
In the Start a New
Workflow section of the Workflows screen, choose from the list of
workflows that you can apply to the list item or file. Click the one you
want to start to open the page that the workflow specifies as its
initiation page (see Figure 3).
This page appears every time you initiate a workflow on an item, and
each different workflow may have a different page. Some workflows do not
have an initiation form at all.
In
the case of the Approval workflow, the initiation page asks for one or
more approvers to assign the approval task to (this may be already
filled in by the workflow’s settings) and whether they should be
approving in a serial sequence (one after another) or all at once. It
also provides a place to write text describing your approval request and
asks for a due date for the approval process and how long each person
in the approvers list should have to complete the approval. Finally, it
provides an option to notify other people on the approval process, in
the CC section.
After you fill in the initiation
form, click Start. The workflow might take a while to start, and then
you are redirected to the list or library. The approval workflow then
creates a task in the tasks list in the site and assigns it to the
approvers you have selected (see Figure 4).
The task then sends an e-mail message to those approvers, telling them
of the task. The approver has options to approve, reject, request a
change, or reassign, as shown in Figure 4.
