USE CASE
Automating the review and approval process to manage the lifecycle of your policies and procedures can ensure that critical documents stay fresh and up-to-date. This helps reduce the chance of accidents, compliance violations, and other problems.
You can use a workflow to set expiration dates to notify you when it is time to review and update your documents to ensure that your policies and procedures are up-to-date, consistent, and secure.
What are ways teams benefit?
Maintain consistency across your organization so that employees work from up-to-date versions of documents, reducing the risk of misunderstandings or outdated practices.
Protect sensitive information from unauthorized access or data breaches with security measures such as access restrictions and encryption available with document management.
Continuously improve company policies and procedures by conducting regular document reviews for relevance and practicality, tracking changes, and providing access to previous versions for internal and external audits.
Document lifecycles
Document management is not just a matter of convenience; it's a critical element of effective governance, risk management, and compliance. It ensures that employees have access to the correct information at the right time in a secure and organized manner, ultimately contributing to the success and longevity of a company.
With Comala Document Management, you can define document lifecycles that reflect the stages of your service and process designs.
You can define specific workflow milestones and permissions for each stage, ensuring only authorized users can access and modify the documents.
For example, you might have a proposal stage, a project plan stage, a development stage, and a testing stage. If publishing a policy or practice guide, you can prevent these from becoming stale by setting a time period for an “out-of-date” review.
To get started
install Comala Document Management by getting started on the Atlassian Marketplace or through “find new apps” in your Confluence instance
apply a workflow across all documents in a space or use workflows on a page-by-page basis
configure your workflow in the space settings Comala Document Management dashboard
edit and customize your workflow using the workflow builder visual editor for advanced authoring to create a more flexible and responsive workflow for your document process needs
Choose from the “out of the box” workflows, or create your own!
Content expiry workflow
Content Expiry is an “out of the box” workflow in the app!
The Content Expiry Workflow is designed to help keep your content fresh, the approved pages will expire after a set period of time, so that it can be reviewed again.
The workflow consists of four states
Review - while the page is awaiting review
Rejected - when the page is rejected
Approved - when the page has been approved, this state will automatically transition to Expired once the deadline is reached
Expired - when the page previously determined date is exceeded. You can always approve this version if the content is still valid
On the page, the workflow popup in the Approved state displays the expiry due date period lozenge.
The workflow popup displays a countdown of the current remaining time period. Each time the page transitions to the Approved state the expiration is reset to 5 months.
Once a page is expired, the Content Expiry Workflow will automatically send email notifications to page-watchers. This custom notification is created by a workflow trigger added to the workflow.
The trigger code can be viewed and edited in the workflow builder visual editor in the Edit Workflow panel.
Managing content expiration using workflow parameters
Content expiration can be set for any workflow state, not just your published content.
In the Content Expiry workflow, the Approved state expiry uses a workflow parameter to manage the expiry due date period.
We have a helpful way of managing this value & providing control over the expiration due date in a space by setting the value for workflow parameters included in a workflow.
The value of the workflow parameter can be changed in the space settings Document Management dashboard by a space admin using the Set Parameters button.
The Set Parameters button is only displayed if the displayed workflow in space workflow configuration includes at least one workflow parameter.
Choose Set Parameters to display all workflow parameters in a dialog box.
The changed value will be used by the workflow when it next encounters the workflow parameter, for example when the workflow is applied to other content across the space.
This allows the same workflow to be used in different spaces with different values for the reviewers for the approval; for the project team or the expiration due date.
You can add an additional workflow parameter for each different team of reviewers or an expiration due date for a different workflow state. This allows the management of your document process locally, changing the values for the workflow parameter for each space without the need to create a different workflow for each space.
Customer case studies
Many of our customers use Comala Document Management as part of their review and approval document management process. These include some customers who use our app and Comala Publishing to help attain FDA Title 21 CFR Part 11 in the life sciences industry.
Disclaimer
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