Approving Collaborative Terms

Collaborative Term Review and Approval Functions

Overview

Collaborative term review and approval enables you to divide the responsibilities for creating, reviewing, and approving terms among the members of your team. In this way, each role can be fulfilled by the most qualified member of the group. Each person participating in the collaborative process must be assigned the appropriate permissions for the role. For more information about permissions, see Managing Root Level Authorizations.

You can enable collaboration by selecting the appropriate term type in the Type field when you create a term. The Term Type Manager window contains fields that enable you to specify optional workflows that support creating, editing, and deleting terms. You can specify default status values and importance labels for each term type. You can also use the Business Roles section create groups of specific users for notifications. For more information about term types, see Managing Term Types.

Note: These workflows must be configured for your instance of SAS Business Data Network. See Configuring Workflow in SAS Business Data Network.

An Example of Approval Processing

Overview

The processes to conduct simple and extended collaborative term review approval are identical, except for the inclusion of a technical review component in the extended version. Therefore, the following example of extended processing illustrates the simpler process. The extended process contains the following stages:

Term Creation
Collaborative Term Review and Approval Functions
A Sample Collaborative Flow

Term Creation

Follow the process described in Adding Terms to create the term. Be sure to select the appropriate Type to specify the type of collaborative term flow that you want to use.

The Shelving Rack term needs both a business review and a technical review, so the type selected is Create Extended, as shown in the following display:

Extended Review Process Term

Now you can define the term and click Submit in the toolbar to add it to the collaborative term flow. All of the users who have been added as contacts to the term are notified by email when the term is created or changed. You can define default contacts on a term type, and those contacts will be added initially to all new terms of that type. Email is enabled by default for SAS Business Data Network. However, you can enable or disable email notifications that being sent to you when you are logged in.

Note that the Create Extended term type is not a default term type. It was created using the process described in Managing Term Types.

The toolbar is shown in the following display:

Terms Toolbar

The term is also added to the Notifications list for these users. The Notifications view contains terms in collaborative flows for which the current user is a potential or actual owner. The current user does not have to have been added as a contact for the term.

The following display shows the list:

Notifications List

Collaborative Term Review and Approval Functions

You can process a term through a collaborative flow by using the functions listed in the following table:

Collaborative Term Review and Approval Functions
Function	Action	Result
Claim a term for processing	Click Claim	Provides access to term in collaborative workflow.
Release a term from processing	Click Unclaim	Returns term to terms list without changing its status.
Reject a proposed term	Click Reject	Marks a term as rejected but leaves it in the terms list to be deleted or submitted.
Clears changes made to a term	Click Clear	Discards unpublished drafts for a term and restores the term to its last published version.
Delete a term	Click Delete	Marks a term for deletion.
Submit a term for review	Click Submit for Review	Places term in the collaborative flow for business or technical review.
Approve a term in its current state	Click Approve Changes	Places term in the collaborative flow.
Approve the term and publish it to the terms list	Click Publish	Removes term from the collaborative flow and publishes it to the terms list.

A Sample Collaborative Flow

This example follows the Shelving Rack term through an extended collaborative flow.

Perform the following steps:

Select the Shelving Rack term.
A business approver clicks Claim to claim the term for processing in the Business Review Step.
A business approver clicks Approve Changes to approve the term in the business review. The term is passed to the Technical Editing Step.
A technical editor clicks Claim to claim the term for processing in the Technical Editing Step.
A technical editor clicks Submit for Review to move the term to the Technical Review Step.
A technical approver clicks Claim to claim the term for processing in the Technical Review Step.
A technical approver clicks Publish to remove the term from the collaborative flow and add it to the terms list with a Production status.