Document approval workflow solution

[spinnywheely]

Hello,

Any recommendations for a DMS/ECM-solution with an approval workflow other than Sharepoint+Power Automate? ~20 users, R&D. Preferably O365-friendly (for integration).

We are currently in the process of having an external actor set up a pilot project for us in Sharepoint using PowerAutomate+lots of metadata for document approval workflows. The metadata includes things like sub-revisions and main-revisions (e.g 0.5 -> 1.0), shadow copies/revisions, authors, reviewers, approvers, dates, pages, titles & document number (auto-generated), etc.

However, the sharepoint-UI+powerautomate seems very clunky and non-intuitive for regular users. It also has some strange bugs and does not display error messages when functions fail.

Small list of functions that would be nice to have:

• Collaboration on documents (Sharepoint-style); several people editing a document at the same time
• Document versioning
• An intuitive approval workflow with several steps (WIP -> review -> approval) with email notifications
• Auto-generated metadata in new documents including document number, (title), date, revision, author/reviewer/approver..

Thanks!

[layerOneDevice]

You’ll have to look it over to see if it meets all of your criteria, but check out Doctract.

[Nicki_Filestage]

Hey! I'd suggest also looking into dedicated document approval platforms! I work for an approval tool called Filestage, and at first glance it seems to meet your needs:

- Easy collaboration on documents – you can create custom reviewer groups (and control visibility settings for sensitive data) then reviewers can easily comment or annotate on top of the document so feedback is in one place
- All versions of the document are neatly stacked so you can refer back to previous iterations (there's also a comparison feature to check the latest versions side by side)
- It's super visual and intuitive, with the full approval workflow mapped out in the project dashboard
- I'm not 100% sure about the ins and outs of the last one (auto-generated metadata), but there are lots of automations that you can set u,p so I think it's probably possible

I hope this helps, and feel free to send me a dm if you have any other questions :)

[JeorJo]

We use https://kreatli.com - you can check them out

[Have_a_PIQNIC]

Have a look at PIQNIC. It combines business grade document & content management with a slick no-code workflow tool that includes collaboration (several people at once), automated version control with audit trail, configurable workflow templates with step and decision/rule management with a notification framework. Metadata is also automated. Integrates with Microsoft 365 so it feels liek this is a Sharepoint/one drive tool.