This is a collection of questions and answers about Microsoft® Content Management Server (MCMS) gathered from the MCMS newsgroup. This content is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. If you have feedback about one of these topics or would like to add information, please post your comments to the MCMS newsgroup. Thank you, Stefan Goßner Escalation Engineer Steve Cawood Program Manager
I have an issue in MCMS. I find that postings are locked to various users as they travels through the workflow. For example, when a request for approval is denied, the posting is not sent to the author it came from.
Here is a sample workflow:
Any Help would be greatly appreciated.
This behavior is as expected. When the Editor changed the content he acted as an Author - not as an Editor. Then when he later declined it, he acted as an Editor. The decline action returns the posting to the last author - and this was the Editor himself.
To prevent this, the Editor must not do any changes before declining the posting. One option would be to remove the "Edit" link in the console for Editors. This would ensure that Editors cannot act as Authors.To allow comments to be sent to the author, the following console extension can be used. It allows an Editor to add a comment when declining. This comment can be picked up by a workflow event and possibly sent to the Author by email.The sample can be found here:http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=88d0484d-d380-4ad7-ac6c-59c58f996601
When I update a posting only editor approval is required and not moderator approval. Is this a bug?
No this is not a bug. Editors and Moderators approve different changes.
- Editors approve content changes- Moderators approve property changes
So when a placeholder content gets changed only Editor approval is required. When a posting is moved then only Moderator approval is required.
If you need a 2-level workflow then either implement a 3rd party workflow engine like the workflow engine from Teamplate (www.teamplate.com) or force a property change when the posting is changed. This can be done using a workflow event.
Whenever a posting state switches to "waiting for moderator approval" the page goes offline. This does not happen when the posting state switches to "waiting for editor approval". Why does this happen and how can I prevent this?
This is expected behavior in MCMS. Internally, MCMS uses two different objects: the page object and the posting object. Editors approve changes to the page object (which holds the placeholder content and the custom properties) while the Moderator approves changes to the posting object (which stores properties like the display name, the start and expiration date and the reference to the template being used by this page).
This concept of page/posting is used to implement connected postings. All connected postings use the same page object to share the content.
MCMS supports versioning for the page object but not for the posting object. So whenever the posting object requires approval, the posting changes to "waiting for moderator approval" and there is no longer a published version of the object available.
There are two workarounds to avoid this:
When a new page is created, what is the sequence that the ASP.NET workflow events get fired?
I have assigned a rights Group (Editor or Moderator) to one of my channels. The rights group does not contain any users. When I now submit a new page the state switches to waiting for editor/moderator approval even though there is no editor or moderator available to do the approval. Is this expected?
Yes, this is expected behavior. MCMS only checks whether there are any rights groups from these user roles assigned to the channel. The server does not look to see whether that rights group contains any valid users. So even if a Editor or Moderator rights group has no AD users or groups assigned to it, the workflow state will still be set to an appropriate "waiting for approval" after a page has been submitted.
The reason for this behavior is that any channel with an Editor and/or Moderator rights group assigned is assumed, by definition, to require appropriate approvals on all pages posted there. The fact that there are no users explicitly assigned to the Editor and/or Moderator rights group in question does not eliminate the need for approval, therefore the pages must not skip the appropriate "waiting for approval" stages of the MCMS workflow.
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