Workflow Newbie needs help!

So I was thinking a bit more about this, but I still don't really get it.

I was thinking that the first Sales guy to enter the document into M-files has to specify who the other approvers will be setting the values of the three properties that hold the name of the approvers. This sales guy then approves the document by moving it into the "Awaiting Finance Approval" state, at which point a notification will be sent to the Finance approver, whose name was entered into the property field. This continues until all approvals are given.

Having played about a little in the administrators tool in a test vault, I have the following issues:

1) even when I restrict the possible state transitions on the Permissions tab of the workflow state, I can still add a document to the vault and change its state to anything I like without warning

2) when I configure the workflow state to notify me when the document enters or leaves this state, I do not get any notification (presumably by email) even though I have configured my email address in my login account properties?

3) When the Sales guy has approved the document by moving it to "awaiting Finance Approval", I want the finance guy, whose name is stored in one of the properties, to get an email notification. I want only this guy to be able to move the document to the next state (or at least I want to restrict the people who can use change this state, but the name of whoever changes the state has to be recorded, preferably in the approval property, which then becomes readonly). The assignee becomes the next approver. I don't have any idea how to achieve any of this.

Any help?

Hi,
1) People who have administrator right on the vault can switch state as he wants
2) Take a look on notification settings (right click on Server in M-Files Server Administrator), you need to Enable notifications and configure here your email server.
3) When you create Workflow you add a state "awaiting Finance Approval", then in Permissions you click on State Transitions, here you can assign permissions for all switch between states.

Take care of Administrator right on the vault.

Hi.. I've been doing some more investigation and have answered some of my own questions.

1) I realised this whilst in the shower this morning.
2) I found the global notification settings to switch on notifications and correctly configured the email server.
3) I realised that you could set permissions for state transitions, but I was trying to add a check that the state can only be changed if the current user = the guy who was assigned as the approver. I have done this as a post-condition of the state change. I couldn't do this before because I had the "approver" property in the class as a text field rather than a drop-down list of users - this meant I wasn't able to set the post-condition.

I now only have one (new) issue remaining:

1) Currently I have two sets of users - those with readonly access and those with additional rights for admin purposes. I need to add another set for those people who will be part of the workflow i.e. the approvers. I want to set their permissions such that these approvers can only add documents of one specific class type to the vault - we don't want them adding any other kind of documents.

Can you give any tips on how to do this? I'll continue hunting (and reading the manual :))

You can specify in properties of each class defines who can see, edit or create this class.
So if you create a group "approvers" you can simply add permission to create and edit to the class you wants, and defines on others class they can not edit or create.