Configure number of assignees and approval system

You can configure the maximum number of users who can be assigned to a document at the same time; you can also configure the approval system for your documents.

For example, if your team includes four technical writers, you might enter a Max Assigned value of 2 for the Author role, to indicate that only two writers can be simultaneously assigned to any particular document.

Note: Assigned documents appear on users' respective Todo Lists. When a writer creates a document object, that document is automatically assigned to him or her. Additional individuals (in any role) can be assigned to document objects through the Assignments dialog box or by right-clicking a document and selecting Assign to.

Approval systems (also called voting systems) determine the criteria required for a document that has been submitted for review to pass to the next state. There are four approval systems available:

• Not specified: The voting system is unspecified; users in the selected role will not be approving documents and images.
• Unanimous: All users in this role must approve a document or image before it can pass to the next status.
• Simple majority: A majority of users must approve a document or image before it can pass to the next status.
• Single approval: A document or image can pass to the next status once any user in this role has approved it.

Note: You can configure additional approval systems by editing the votingsystems.xml configuration file. Also, if you specify the Simple Majority option, you might want to configure in this file the number of users that make up a majority. See Configure approval systems by editing votingsystems.xml for more information.

To configure the default values for maximum assigned users and approval:

1. Open the Role Manager window.
2. Click the Lock button () in the Manage Roles window.
3. In the Roles list, select the role to configure.
4. In the Max Assigned field, enter the maximum number of persons in that role that can be simultaneously assigned to a document.
5. Click Default Voting System and select the default approval system for this role.
   Note: The value you select can be overridden by project managers when they set the default approval systems for projects.
6. Repeat from Step 3 until you have set up max assigned and approval system values for all the roles in your CMS.
7. To save your changes locally, press CTRL+s.
8. You can now assign document types to roles. If you do not want to perform this step right away, click Check In Document () to commit your changes.
9. Inform users of the changes and request that they close and reopen their CCMS Desktop to apply the changes.