How to Setup Workflow Statuses
Definition
At its core, workflow status—and the changing of workflow status on a piece of content—is a communication tool for your organization to account for the majority of the most common actions that take place within your workflow. Additionally, WebSked has the ability to automatically create tasks when there is a change in this status. One thing to note, these status changes are manual. No events (like save and publish) automatically trigger a change in the workflow status.
Using Workflow Statuses
Let's walk through an example to illustrate how these statuses work. On my site, I have decided that my workflow statuses are going to be "Draft" for the beginning state for my articles, "Edit", which is when a story gets passed from content created to the editor; "Publish" for when a story is ready to be taken live on my site, and "Backread" for when the story is already live on the site but needs a backread.
As a content creator, I have finished the first draft of my story, and I am ready to let my editors know that my story is ready to be looked at. Within Composer, I select Workflow Status and Note: Draft and shift the status from "Draft" to "Edit".
Because I set this up to create a WebSked Task—in this case "Review and Edit"—assigned to the Editors group, when the status of an article moves from "Draft" to "Edit", that task has now been created. Additionally, any notes I added when I changed the workflow status are now associated with this auto-created task. Read Understanding WebSked Groups, Task Triggers, and Notifications to learn more about setting up auto-created tasks.
As an editor, I can monitor tasks that have been assigned to my editor group either through the WebSked Tasks page or through Slack, email, or Microsoft Teams, if that is part of my workflow. When I finish my edits and the story is ready to go live, I can change the workflow status to "Publish".
Creating Workflow Statuses
While your organization sees three default workflow statuses associated with your account—Draft, Edit, Publish—these statuses are customizable per your organization's needs. Some organizations might use four or five statuses to capture their workflow activities, and others might need over a dozen statuses to communicate their nuanced workflow and task management structure. How you set up your workflow statuses is unique to your organization.
To edit and create workflow statuses, navigate to WebSked, click on your profile name in the top right corner of the screen, and select Company. From here, select Schemas, and you see all of the workflow statuses and their associated colors for your organization. You must give each status a unique ID, a display order number (or where it appears in the list of statuses shown to users), a name, and a hex code color value.
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Tips and Suggestions
Here are some recommendations and best practices to keep in mind as you are establishing the workflow statuses for your organization:
Workflow statuses are meant to capture the majority of the touch points for your content workflow. These are the statuses that will capture ~75% of the content in your pipeline. For less common activities, we recommend that you capture these with a task and task template so that these can be manually requested when needed.
Prior to establishing the workflow statuses for your organization, it may be helpful to gather insights from content creator leaders (for example,, editors, writers, etc.). These subject matter experts will be using the editorial tools each day, can speak to workflow inefficiencies, and suggest ways to address these challenges through workflow statuses, groups, tasks, task triggers, and notifications.
When in doubt, less is more. As for most WebSked related items, we recommend that you start small and expand as you determine a need. Rather than create 15 workflow statuses from the very beginning—unless you've determined a need for all of these—it is oftentimes better practice to create a few key statuses and build on these as your users become more comfortable with the tools.