New Features

The following features are new to Intelligent Workflow Approvals in this release.

Delegate Approver

From the May 2015 release onwards, you can assign a delegate user to the current approver. The delegate user can approve requests on behalf of the assigned approver. All approval requests and email notifications are routed to the current approver and the delegated approver.

Reassigning an Approval Request

This feature allows an approver to reassign an approval step in an active approval process in the Assigned state. For example, if, while approving a request, the Deal Desk concludes that a quote needs to be reassigned to Legal to fix terms and conditions, the deal desk assignee will reassign the request to Legal.

Enabling/Disabling the Ad Hoc Approver Capability

An approver can add an ad hoc approver before, after, or parallel to an existing approver. In this release, a new setting is introduced that allows you to enable or disable the ad hoc approver capability for an end user.

Submitting with Attachments

You can submit an object for approval along with an attachment. The attachment should be available in the Notes and Attachments related list. In the Approvals and My Approvals pages when you click Submit Approvals (with Attachments), a list of attachments appear. Select the attachment you want to submit.

New Enhancements

The following section describes existing feature that is changed (or are no longer supported) in May 2015 Patch 1 (7.350) release.

Consolidated Notification Enhancements

  • The Consolidate Approvals checkbox when selected enables the assignee to receive single consolidated assignment notification for all approval items. An approver can then either approve or reject all the requests that require their approval.
  • The Consolidate Notifications check box, when selected, enables the assignee to receive single consolidated assignment notification for all approval items. An approver then has the flexibility to approve or reject all or subset of the assigned requests.
  • You can use the Consolidate Approvals feature only with the Consolidate Notifications and not independently. When you select Consolidate Approvals, Consolidated Notifications is selected by default. However, Consolidated Notifications can be used by itself without Consolidated Approvals.

Also from this release onwards, an assignee will also receive consolidated e-mail notifications for cancellation and notify only requests. If an approver is defined for Notify Only steps, a consolidated notification email is sent once all the Notify Only steps are available. If an approval is cancelled, and the user is an assignee for multiple steps, the user receives a consolidated cancellation notification.

Approval Policy Enhancements

From this release onwards, once an assignee rejects an approval request, you can choose to proceed to send approval requests to the rest of the assignees in the policy despite a rejection. In the earlier releases, the policy status would be set to Rejected even if a single assignee in the rule rejected a request. The Approval policy (supported for the Sub-Process or Child Process steps) now supports a new feature to Continue Policy Approval on a Reject when a policy is enabled.

  • When checked, this feature allows the user to approve their assigned approval requests, as long as the policy criteria can still be met, even though one or more approval requests within the Sub-process or Child process are already rejected.
  • When unchecked, all the approval requests with a status other than Approved, within the Sub-Process or Child Process will be cancelled, whenever any request is rejected. Policy approval for that approval Sub-Process or Child Process will stop immediately.