At a Stump the Panel forum of End User SharePoint Maurice asked:

I have a bunch of documents that need to be audited every six months. Is there a way that a reminder can be set up to remind the owner of the document that its time to review the document?

Laura Rogers suggested the following for Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007:

If you have MOSS, you can use the information management policy settings in the document library. You can set it to: Modified Date + 6 months. Then, make it kick off a workflow at that point. Use an OOB one, or create your own "review" workflow that will "Collect data from a user" in the workflow.

Maurice is using WSS so here is a solution to utilitze on top of WSS.

Prerequisites

Create a document library. Turn on versioning, require check-ins and content approval. To create this custom workflow you will need SharePoint Designer.

Workflow model

To achieve the desired behavior we will be using the following workflow:

Creating workflow model

1.       Fire-up your SharePoint designer and open your web site
2.       Select File > New > Workflow
3.       Create a workflow with the following settings (choose your document library)

Defining a new workflow with SharePoint Designer

4.       Click Next and configure the workflow as shown on figure below

Configuring workflow steps

There are four actions in this step: After pausing for 180 days, workflow updates the approval status for a document to "Pending" and assigns an Audit Review task to the responsible user. Once this task is complete, the document status is changed back to "Approved".

The change of approval status in the final step will fire another instance of this same workflow and the entire process will start over.

Document library with Audit Review workflow

In this post I used the default Approval status column, but you can create a custom column and custom status to track workflow stage.

Author: Toni Frankola SharePoint Use Cases Toni started his Web adventure in late 90’s and has been working with various web technologies ever since.

Toni is leading project engagements and managing a team of consultants specializing in Microsoft technologies. His primary focus is on Microsoft Office SharePoint and Dynamics CRM. He works at Perpetuum Mobile, a Microsoft Gold Partner from Croatia.

• Discussion Board vs. Blog
• Blog Usage in SharePoint
• Post to SharePoint Blog Using Windows Live Writer

In my previous article I covered the difference between a Discussion Board and a Blog.  Personally, I’m a fan of the blog site template in SharePoint.  Many organizations tend to struggle with how they can use a blog and for what general purpose. So, let’s review a few different scenarios where a blog may be useful for you.  

External Blog

• Customer Connection
• Uses of your site have a ‘face’ to who they are researching
• Users can get a feel for who the company is, a close look at key team members
• Your site (and organization) will feel more personable to users
• Marketing Tool
• They index well in search engines
• They are an extension of your brand
• Competitive edge
• Blogs can illustrate your expertise and knowledge within your line of business
• Content on your site is consistently up-to-date
• Executive Relations
• Executive messages can be blogged, providing the public with a sense of connection to the company
• Keep investors abreast of company direction

 Internal Blog

• Team Communication
• Communication within an individual team can be structured through blogs
• Communication across teams can be streamlined and in one location
• Project Management
• Communication for a project can be done utilizing a blog
• See on EndUserSharePoint.com: 3 Ways to Use a SharePoint Blog for Project Success
• Executive Communication
• Messages from senior management can be provided to company via a blog
• Users within a company will feel connected to management and not ‘in the dark’
• Intangible Knowledge Gathering
• Employees can blog their ideas, best practices, success points – these intangible thoughts (knowledge) are then data and can be leveraged for increasing success in other areas of the company (even after employees are gone).

Conclusion

This was just a small sample of the different uses for a blog within your company.  I hope it has generated some thoughts and ideas for you.  Examine your company and think about where you have a ‘message’ to deliver.  If you decide that a blog will help with the communication of that message, start blogging!  EndUserSharePoint is having a Live Online Workshop on the Fundamentals of Wikis and Blogs this week.  I highly recommend it for helping you getting a blog started in your company. 

Dan Lewis, SharePoint Consultant & Evangelist Blog: Sharing The Point (SharePoint) As an IT Professional he has 10 years of experience in development, design, architecture, and administration. He now specializes in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. He enjoys public speaking, participating in the online community, and blogging about SharePoint. He is currently a Senior SharePoint Consultant for ettain group, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, in Charlotte NC.

Overview

Learning about blogs and wikis is the next logical step, after Lists and Libraries, in an End User’s transition from basic user to Power User. In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into the use of blogs and wikis for documentation, journals, meeting minutes, policies and procedures documentation, and other uses as needed by the participants.

Agenda

Who Should Attend This Workshop

The "Fundamentals" Series of Workshops by EndUserSharePoint.com are for entry level and beginning level End Users of SharePoint who have Contributor permissions on their site. This series is also useful for Team Site Managers who will be supporting End Users and Site Members.

Testimonials from previous participants of EndUserSharePoint.com live online workshops

"This was one of the best training sessions I have attended. It delivered a lot of powerful information yet was simple to follow and participate in." - Heidi [The Fundamentals of Lists and Libraries]

"The hands on training along with following your lead, helped me get more confident in working in SharePoint." - Linda [The Fundamentals of Lists and Libraries]

"Very professional work. Thanks to Mark and his team. The workshop format with the hands-on lab made the 3 hours webconferencing event a valuable experience for me." - Urs [The Fundamentals of Lists and Libraries]

"I thought the training was terrific! Very informative and at a good pace." - Sharon [The Fundamentals of Lists and Libraries]

We have just completed another session of the Basics of Content Types live online workshop. This is an area for the participants to give me feedback and comments on the session.

The session began with an overview of what content types are and why they are useful. We then went into an extended hands-on section where everyone created content types and associated them with a Finance Report library, along with various document templates.

That’s the basics. Let’s see what they have to say…

I was looking at my hosted SharePoint WSS solution and realized there was no Feedback, Approval or Disposition workflow. When I contacted support, they said Three-State was the only one available out of the box. That didn’t sound right, so I hit Twitter. Here’s the response thread.

@ESUP
I’m on a support call with SharePointHosting.com. They say the only default workflow in WSS is 3 State. True? What about Feedback, Approval?

@RobBogue
Approval and Collect Feedback are MOSS. WSS is just 3 state

@PirateEric
those should be enabled too I believe, perhaps they didn’t activate that feature? Good stuff on the content types too.

@iwkid
I believe that is correct - WSS only ships with the 3-state workflow

@PirateEric
well I was wrong, the others are MOSS only defaults I see. http://is.gd/pidR

@dmcwee
I think that is correct. I believe WSS 3.0 only has the 3 Step workflow, by default. However, its been a while so I’m not 100%.

@airdalle
No, Approval and Feedback workflow are by default in WSS

@DanLewisNet
ya, wss has 3 default. approval, collect feedback, three state

@ToniFrankolaWell you can recreate these by SharePoint Designer in just a few clicks.

@LoweDaveI believe that is correct tfor a Team site WSS only, Feedback Approval are MOSS related. Publishing or Portal site collections

@meetduxYes, WSS 3.0 only has the three-state workflow out of the box. All the other workflows comes with MOSS 2007

@ToniFrankolaList level

@WoodyWindy
WSS does have a non-workflow-based approval mechanism, and of course, you can always use SPD to create one-off WF.

Thanks to everyone for the input. Here’s the confirmation documentation if you need it: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA101641241033.aspx#2

Mike Fortgens twittered me on a couple of things he needs clarified when using the Mind Manager Templates for SharePoint. This is a 4 minute demo to show how you can utilize the Mind Map that was made available in this week’s newsletter to create your own, custom templates.