As a Community Owner, you will need to set up approval workflows for products. You have the ability to set up custom approval steps for your products through the Product Flow feature. This is a way to internally track and approve all the products in your community.
Steps to Configuring a Product Approval Flow
- Go to the Products admin page by clicking the gear icon next to Products in the left navigation. Then, select Approval Flows and click the '+' button to add a product flow.
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To get started, name the Product Flow and select who gets notified when a product is shared and when a product is changed.
- When you first create an approval flow, three steps will be added to get you started. Each of these step names, as well as the supplier-facing names, are editable. This is the case for any step you add. The first step in your approval flow cannot be deleted; this is the default status that a product will originate in when a supplier shares a product, when you add a product on behalf of a supplier, or when a supplier creates a draft of the product. Read more about product drafts in the article, Reviewing Products Shared With Me.
- For each step, you can click on the box next to the step name to color code the step to easily spot and quickly react each state in the Product list as a Community Owner.
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You can also define which roles should be notified by email when a product is moved into this step and which roles have edit permissions in this step.
- Who gets notified at this step? - Select one or more roles from the list provided. These are the custom roles that you've setup for your business and may have assigned to your internal users. If you need to setup custom roles visit this how-to article. Any user with the specified role will receive an email notification when a product has transitioned to this step. All users included in the step will have visibility of any comment made in the step.
- Who can edit in this step? - By default Product Flow steps will allow the community contact to make edits. For internal steps, you can select one or more roles within your business to edit the flows while it is in this step.
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Click the envelope in the top-right corner to set up an email configuration for users you've set to be notified in this step. You can use the
button to populate fields from the flow in your message. Click OK once complete.
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Lock products in this status: When this box is checked, products will become locked and the supplier will not be able to delete the product or make changes to this version. Both you and the supplier can create a draft at any time, where any changes will be located until you're ready to move the product to another locked status.
Consider utilizing locked statuses if there are steps in the product approval flow where you'd like to prevent a supplier from making changes, such as an "Approved" step.
Prior to the Spring 2024 Release, this checkbox stated, Create a draft version if the supplier makes changes. Now, a draft will still be created when a supplier makes changes to a product in this status, with the addition that the current version will become locked and visible to both parties. To learn more about locked products and drafts, see the article Reviewing Products Shared With Me.
Add transitions to allow your internal users to progress the product through the flow. To modify the text that appears on the transition buttons, click into the box and rename as appropriate. You will also need to specify which step each transition button is linked to.