PageProof Academy: Masterclass on workflows setup, steps & approval management

Okay, so let's get started on workflows. Workflows are a central part of the PageProof experience, and in fact, workflows are really, really critical for moving your work through your organization. So the idea of a workflow is that you can drop in a piece of work and the workflow will take that piece of work and then move it through the various stages of approval from your teams. The great thing with the PageProof workflows is workflow templates and the steps inside of your workflows are not limited at all. You can have as many workflow templates as you like. You can have workflow templates at your team level. You can have them at your individual level, and you can share your individual and team ones to your workmates as well. So those features are all there. Okay, so I've just come in and I'm in the workflows area. So to get to workflows, or particularly the workflows area, just come over to the menu at the top Go to Workflows, and then you can click on the icon to create a new workflow template. So here we are inside the screen where I can start building a workflow template. And the first thing I need is a name. So at the top here, I'm going to say this is my, my creative workflow. Incredibly creative name, but here we have the creative workflow. And down below, you can see I've got these 3 icons here, or 3 tabs, I should say. The workflow itself, who are the proof owners, and who this is shared with. So I'll go through these in a moment. Now you'll see here that I've already put into my workflow the final approver. So this is the person who's ultimately going to sign off the work here. And we have announcement about final approvers coming soon. I'll give you a hint of that at the end of this webinar. You can probably guess what that is. So here I have the ability to create steps. So those plus icons that you see here, this is where you can add steps in. My first step is going to be named my creative team. And inside my creative team, I'm going to have in here some people who are going to take care of my creative check. Now, a little tip. You can actually preset what the role is going to be before you type an email address in. So if I say, hey, this is going to be mandatory, as I now go in and add more people in, the default role in this particular workflow step is going to be mandatory. So if I come in now And I add in Ray, who is going to show me here. You'll see the next one that it adds is a mandatory as well. So great little tip there on how to set up your workflows, and you want to be able to do that nice and quickly. Now let's go through the roles of the people that are going to be in my workflow. So let's take a look here at putting in and putting in these 3 roles that you see. So the first one here is reviewer. Reviewers are people who can come onto your proof, they can leave feedback, they can make a decision, but their decision isn't— it's not one that is required to be actioned, and they really are just leaving feedback on your work. So reviewer can leave comments, they can make a decision, but the decision does not influence the workflow and moving on to next steps. So generally, the majority of people are going to be reviewers. The next one that you see here is mandatory. Mandatory is somebody who must see it and we must get their decision. So this would be a stakeholder in that particular team. And mandatories, they, their decision does influence moving to the next step of the workflow. So we do need to have their decision, otherwise we're not flowing to the next step of the workflow. And then the next one here is gatekeeper. Gatekeepers have everything that mandatory has, everything that gatekeepers have, but they have an extra feature, which is they can send a to-do list. So a gatekeeper can stop the workflow, make some changes or mark up changes from others, and send it back to say these changes need to be done. So they are quite a, quite a powerful role, and you really want to use gatekeepers sparingly in your workflow. 'cause the more gatekeepers you have, the slower your proof progresses through. But let's set up a typical kind of workflow here. So I'm going to go in here and say, hey, I want Ray to be in my creative team, and Ray can be mandatory. We'll put Clark in here as well. And Clark is going to be just a reviewer. So we can get Clark's feedback, but it doesn't influence the way that we move through. And then I'm going to add into here, we'll put in someone else in here, maybe Janson. So Janson can be part of this as well, and Janson will also be mandatory. Now, in my creative team, you can see I've got 2 mandatories here, and this shows a feature of PageProof, which is this little gray bar that you see down here. And if you read the text in it, it says this step waits for all mandatory reviewers' decisions. So if I put this proof— this workflow— and put a proof through it now, it would get to the step and it would then wait for Ray and wait for Janson to leave their decisions. And once they do, then it meets this condition and it will move on to the next step. Now, the great thing here is that you can change by clicking on all, you can change the threshold. So you can go in and say, hey, I just need 1 decision, I need 2 decisions, I need 5 decisions. You can do whatever you like here. And you can even put numbers in here for any future any future decisions. So if I made this 4, for example, I need 4 decisions inside of here. Let's go in and change that value. And if I made somebody here an inviter by switching on this little green icon here, it now means that Ray can add more people to this workflow. And once up to 4 people make their decisions, then it will move on to the next stage. So you've got a whole lot of control here about setting the thresholds. Of when this step is completed and moves on to the next one. I'm going to switch that back to all, and I'm going to add another step in here, which is going to be our legal team. So this is our legal team, and inside of our legal team, we're going to have our lawyer, and that happens to be me. So I'll throw me in here. So there I am, and I'm going to be a gatekeeper. So you can see now as I'm building my workflow, I've got a creative team who are going to check it first, and I need 2 people to sign it off before it moves on to the next step. Inside legal, I have made this lawyer a gatekeeper. Now what will happen here is that when the proof gets to the legal step, it's going to, it's going to wait for that person just like a mandatory. However, the lawyer is able to mark up changes, and also mark other people's changes as to-do items and send back a to-do list, the proof will never go to the final approver because legal has sent back a to-do list that requires changes. And then when somebody uploads a new version, it starts the workflow from the very top, and it goes through this again. So that is how you can set up a PageProof workflow. Now you can have multiple gatekeepers in one step if you want to. There are some things about that which you could imagine are quite fun. If you have two gatekeepers, either one of them can send back a to-do list, and then the changes can be made, but it requires the condition here to be met for it to move on to the next step. So if you require both gatekeepers to, to approve it, you'll need both of their approval before it goes to the final step of the workflow. So this is a page proof workflow. These are the roles inside of the workflow.. And as you can see, there is a lot of, a lot of power here, particularly when it comes to these thresholds in these, these here. So that's, that is a PageProof workflow setup. Now, up the top, I said I'd come back and we would look at these tabs. So if you want to have default proof owners put onto every proof that this workflow has, then you can put into here Hey, I need, I need people on here. So I'm going to put, you know, I want Roy to be on every single proof that I make as an owner. So now by doing this, Roy is going to be on absolutely every single proof that is made using this workflow template. He'll be added as an owner automatically. And you can have multiple owners added to your proof templates here. And then when you make proofs using this template, it's going to add those owners on automatically. The third item here is Shared With. Now if I go to Shared With, you'll see that we've got a couple of options here. One is to share this workflow template with your team. So you can just switch on the master switch, and now everybody who belongs to your team can now see this workflow template in their menu when they go set up a proof. So they can use your workflow template to send out proofs. That's great. But sometimes you don't want to share it with the entire team. You want to just give it to certain individuals. So you can go into the Share with Users, click on the plus icon here, and put in the email addresses of just the people that you want to be able to see this workflow template. So you can put individual email addresses in here, and only those people in this list will be able to see the proof— see the workflow template. So if I come into here, I'm putting in Shana, for example, and you'll see on the end here, I can go in and I can take her out. Or you can see that at this stage we've got Shana. She can use the template, but she can't edit it. If I wanted to give her the ability to edit my templates, just click onto this icon. And now Shana has the ability to make changes to my template. Okay, so there's our workflow. As I said, we'll go back into here. There's my workflow with the multiple steps. We can see that it can move through these stages. And, of course, the proof owners. So you can go through, and those proof owners, you can add those owners in, as many as you like. And then the sharing of that workflow template, either with your entire team or to individuals. And if you do do individuals, you can give them the ability to edit it as well. Okay, so let's take a look at uploading a proof using that template. So we'll go back into here. And I'm going to drag and drop in a PDF, and it takes us to our proof setup screen. Now, you can see over on the right-hand side, you've got the reviewers here. This is where you can choose your workflow template. So if I click into here now, I'll see that there's my creative workflow, and if I choose that, it loads that template into my proof setup. So you can see here, it's showing my creative team with my mandatories. So again, as we said with mandatories, mandatories, it's going to wait for those people, but it's not going to— they cannot send a to-do list. They are just mandatory. I need their decision. Once it flows from here into the gatekeeper, the gatekeeper can send back a to-do list and mark the changes. And that, that is how that works. And so you can see here we've got this and there's an extra option, a couple of extra options I want to point out here. Number 1, you can set a due date per step. So once the template lands inside of a proof set up like this, you can go step due date and you can put, set a due date for that step. So in the invitation email, these people would see that date as opposed to the overall proof date that you see down here. So setting a due date per step. You'll also see this little green dot here says the workflow is going to start here. And the great thing with that is that if you want to make the workflow start at a different position, just simply click down here and you can say, let's start the workflow from here. And the great thing is it's going to skip that step above. Those people will still be able to leave feedback, but they won't receive an email saying that the proof is there. So that top step now, because I've skipped over it, they don't, don't get an invite. But if they happen to click on the proof link, they'll be able to get in. The proof is going to start from the second step. So that's how you're able to do that. So some options there on setting up and going through that. Okay. Now, while we're at the screen, I'm just going to go and we're going to take a look at a proof where we're going to upload a new version because there's something new here. So I'm going to upload a new version for this proof here. Grab hold of this file. Okay. Uploading a new version. There's a little feature here which is new. So you've had a proof go through its proof cycle. We're now into uploading a new version. And the interesting thing with this proof is a whole bunch of people in the previous version, they marked this as, yeah, as approved. So if we actually go back, we'll open that proof up so you can see it. So let's take a look at the previous version. So if you look at the workflow here, you can see we've got 3 people here who have already approved it. They love it. So when I upload a new version, do I want to send them a new version to look at? And the answer to that is, well, actually I don't. So when you go and upload a new version into PageProof, what it's going to do is it'll show you, here's our workflow to start again. But over here, you can see if I click these three dots, I can say, skip reviewers who previously approved. Now PageProof knows from the previous version who those people were. So if you choose that item, yes, of course you're going to read the message that comes up, click on, click on skip reviewers, and you'll see we've made a new step that says approved the previous version, and it's automatically skipping over them and starting them at this step down here. Great feature. It's, it's something that I think we've really, really had most feedback from the market on so far is being able to just say with one click, hey, everyone who's approved it previously, just put them in the workflow, skip over them. They can still open the proof if they want to, but they're not going to receive and email on this new version. So really, really useful there. So let's go in and take a look at Proof Info. All right, here we are on a proof, and you'll see this is the Proof Info. So I've opened this by clicking on the info icon. It's now showing us this Proof Info pane. Now, this Proof Info pane, just like the proof setup and just like the workflow template screen, it's had an overhaul, and we've made this so it's a lot clearer for you to know exactly where the proof is up to. So you'll see, first thing to point out here, over on the left-hand side of the workflow, we can see we've got this progress line. And the progress line shows you where the proof has been and where it's currently sitting and where it's going in the future. So if you hover over, and this is something I should probably point out, hovering over items on this workflow team, on this new workflow look, is really critical. It gives you a bunch more information. So you'll see here, it's showing me that this step is complete and here's the date and time it was done. And it's showing me, I go down, it's sitting, the proof is at this step. So it's showing me very clearly, this is where the proof is. It's with the product team. So that progression, very clear exactly where it is, and no more guessing on how and where the proof is in your workflow. Another thing to note here is you'll see these dots on the side. We've got a green dot here and two gray dots. If you hover over the green dot, it says seen. So it's telling you this person has seen it, and this is when they saw it. This is when they open the proof. And if you hover over the gray dots here, it says not seen yet, that person hasn't opened the proof yet. So this is how you can check. And at a glance, you can see all the green ones, or you can see the gray ones here, and you can hover to get more detail. So that's really, really useful for that. Okay, next thing, if you hover over icon here will now give you a little hover card, and this hover card will show you the email address, the person's name, but it also shows you how many comments they made. So you can see right here that they made comments, and you can see when the last time they commented was. So again, hovering over information is really critical here. So this is showing you exactly what you need to know. And the great thing about it is that if you go through and you nudge or skip anyone, so if we look at this person down here, haven't made any comments, so I'd like to come in and give that person a nudge. So you'll see the nudge and skip icons are now on the side here. So just click on the, on the 3 dots and you can go down now and you can say nudge this user in the step or you can skip them. So I'm just going to nudge this person. Okay, don't add a message. No, we'll just give them a standard push. And then if I hover over this card, it tells me last nudged a few seconds ago. So that this card, these hover cards, very useful for the information regarding that particular reviewer. Now, while I'm in here, there's a few new things that you can do. One of the, one of the things that we've done recently is relax the permission changing inside of the current workflow step. So you can see this is the step that we're up to. And I've decided that I would like to take Sharna to a reviewer. So you can simply now just change the person's role in the current step. So this is something that you couldn't do previously, you can do now. So you can go through and you can change the person's permissions in the current step, which is extremely useful for the situations where you think, ah, I should have done that from the setup. Now you can do that. So all of that's there. You can also come in, by the way, and just overtype their email address if you want to change them. So I think, oh, actually I should have Clark in here. Simple, no problem. You can just come in, Overtype, and you can just put another person in. So we'll put Clark in here instead and just put Clark into the workflow. So just overtype, and the same goes for the final approver step as well. In the final approver step, just overtype the person and then just add the new email address in, and it changes who the final approver is. So that's something new to these workflows as well. Okay, so a couple of things to also go through on this. You'll notice that we have a, a new way that you can see this progression. You can see it's flowing down. You can add steps into the workflow here as well. So you're always able to add the steps into the future for when your workflow is underway. And at the top, as always, you've got the little widget here showing you the summary. But if you click these three dots, you can nudge all, skip all, or if you want to, you can save a new workflow template from here. So there's some great additions into these workflows for that side of it. Okay. Now what I want to go through was taking a look at what we're doing in the future. So workflows, one thing to note, workflows have one final approver, and this is something coming in the next couple of weeks. You'll be able to have multiple final approvers in here. So the great thing was there, the great thing there is that the multiple final approvers will give you the ability to set a whole bunch of people who can give it final sign-off. And you can set the threshold as well of how many you need to finally approve. So multiple final approvers are arriving very, very soon. So we hear you on that, which is going to be great. And the other thing we're going to be bringing soon to the workflow is the ability to move it back a step. So sometimes you may have had the workflow flow into the next step and you think, oh no, actually, it needs to go back because I need to get a decision from this other person. Very soon, you'll be able to reverse the progress by pushing it back a step. And then people will be able to do that step again. So this is coming very, very soon to the PageProof workflows. Now, one more thing I want to bring up is that coming up very, very soon, we're bringing into PageProof a feature. It's actually an overarching feature called PageProof Intelligence. We are not taking OpenAI and putting it into PageProof. Don't worry. And then calling it AI. We're not doing that. What we're doing is when it comes to intelligence, we are going to be using an intelligence platform that we've created ourselves that will go through and give you useful intelligence on the things that you're doing with proofing. That's going to be rolling out for the rest of the year. And it's going to do some really great things for you. So the first cut of that coming in the next few weeks will be out, actually probably in the next couple of weeks. And the great thing with that is that you'll see that just coming into your— it makes things, it helps you, and it makes things much, much easier in the platform. There is a specific PageProof Intelligence feature coming to workflows as well, which will make the workflows a lot smarter, and it will help with the progression of your workflows and getting your deadlines done. That's the most important thing. We've got to work towards your deadlines. Thank you very much, everybody, for your time, and have a great rest of your day.