How to Design Custom E-mail Template Workflow

PAIN POINTS

Before elaborating on the functionality, Let us discuss the workflow notification related pain points observed during employee central workflow implementations

• Few standard templates: There were only few delivered templates which were auto selected by the system based on workflow actions.  For example ‘Workflow Action Pending Notification ‘ which was sent during initiation of any event  , ‘Workflow Action Approval Notification’  which was sent on completion of workflow.  Since same template was selected for all initiations or approvals, not considering the type of event or nature of data change, the information given in notification to the user was limited and generic.  Business always wanted information in the notification specific to the event such as leave of absence versus name or job change.
• Limitation of tags / variables: There was a finite list of tags or variable which could be used as a part of content in the notification.  The only way different tags could be used was in language specific templates, such as French template could use different content than English template.
• Lack of flexibility to switch off standard notifications – There was a system restriction that at all times standard workflow notifications were always on and there was no choice to turn them off. This lead to the information overload and unwanted messages in inbox to the managers.  There was not a single project where this limitation was not discussed.

NEW FUNCTIONALITY 

Now provides an optimized workflow notifications solution and an option to utilize Document Generation tool to prepare and customize workflow email notification content. There is a vast choice of data fields for dynamic content generation i.e., all current and future Employee Data field values which are saved in the system from various portlets.  Businesses have now flexibility to use either standard or custom notification, or even no notification for each workflow step through newly delivered workflow email notification configuration tool.

Custom notification template creation is indeed a huge leap in the area of workflow configurations.  This way the intended audience receives relevant rather than the generic information and can take informed decisions. The added ability to switch the standard notification off saves the unnecessary clogging of mail boxes of approvers and contributors.

CONFIGURATION STEPS 

For the demonstrations, lets pick up a simplest example of a workflow – Name Change of an Employee where approver receives a custom workflow email notification while CC role receives standard workflow email notification.

For our example, we will configure A Custom workflow notification template and assign this template to the step 1 Approver (to get notified) when a workflow (Name Change) is initiated.

Pre-requisites: Enable Document Generation tool  using provisioning access and maintain the role based permissions to manage document templates and manage document template mapping.

STEP I Prepare custom template and template group using Document Generation tool

To complete a custom template , following actions are required

1. Create Document generation template group
2. Create custom Template for Workflow notification in Document Generation tool
3. Map dynamic text fields to actual employee data fields or workflow tags using Document Generation Mapping tool

Each of these actions are explained in detail below