appiversity Workflows

Workflows can replace the paper forms, Word documents, and PDF files that you are circulating via email to drive approvals and workflow.

Here’s the scenario to think about:

• A student wants to drop a course.
• The student needs to fill out a form, and get their instructor’s signature.
• From there, they may need to have that form forwarded to the department chair or dean for another round of approval.
• Lastly, the form is forwarded to the registrar, where the request is processed.

This scenario get’s repeated within academics countless times - from student requests, faculty travel requests, course scheduling modifications, graduation applications, etc.

Ten or fifteen years ago, most institutions did this with paper forms, where each person along the approval chain needed to sign the document. There’s a certain convenience to this - there’s just one copy of the form, and it’s easy to fill out. It’s wasteful, and expensive though - and forms get lost.

Then we all started digitizing, and it went something like this:

• Paper documents were converted into PDFs, but they were really difficult to “sign”. People printed them, filled them out, signed them, scanned them, and emailed them. This didn’t help much!
• PDFs were then made “fillable”, which helped, since now at least the form data didn’t need to to be handwritten anymore!
• PDFs could be digitally signed - either by drawing a signature, attaching a photo of a drawn signature, or using a digital signature that needed to be created and configured on the user’s computer. This seemed right - but of course getting the signatures to reliably work, on everyone’s computer, was a nightmare.

Ultimately, we replaced wasteful paper forms with thousands of email attachments, IT headaches configuring digital signatures (which really aren’t necessary - these aren’t exactly legal documents!), and aggravation.

After all that, those digital documents remain in everyone’s email archives - there’s no repository for them. There’s no real paper trail at all!

Some institutions, recognizing the inefficiencies, adopted tools from the legal and real estate industry, which managed the digital signing of documents across approval chains without installation and email forwarding - but they are expensive.

Workflows offers an alternative. With workflows, you can easily create your forms and publish them in a searchable listing. Users can fill forms, and get data prepopulated - which drastically improves accuracy. You can create approval chains, and the form is instantaneously routed to where it needs to go. Every step along the way, there is a full audit of who’s approving, and when. All stakeholders can see the status of the approval and workflow. When the workflow is complete, it’s archived and searchable from one place - by everyone.

Finally, workflows is free (although long term retention is limited to paid plans). It’s included in the Kickstart package.

Explore Workflow Documentation

• Creating Workflows - learn how to create new workflows for your constituents.
• Publishing Workflows - learn how to publish searchable workflow listings, allowing anyone to initiate a workflow.
• Public Workflows - explore how students and public (non-affiliated) people interact with public workflows - including email verification and checking on workflow status.
• Submitting / Starting Workflows - see how forms will be submitted by constituents.
• Workflow Notifications - learn how users are notified of workflow activity, and what their options are.
• Workflow Queue - see how your users can quickly find workflows that need their attention, and how they can review archived workflows to leverage a full and accurate “paper trail”.
• Workflow Approval - review the features available to approvers, and how workflows flow through approval, revision, and rejection states.