Excluded Agents?

[Svanikier, Helena]

Hi Jim
 
The way your workflow behaves with the excluded agents, is as designed.
The concept behind excluded agents is to prevent users from signing their
own requests or if you have a 2-Level approval-Workflow and the approvals
should be given by 2 different persons, then you would use the  excluded
agent, to prevent the first approver from signing a second time.
 
But the excluded agents do not set a workflow step obsolete!
 
If you don't want the second approval step in case the first approver =
second approver, the you will have to model this in your workflow
definition. So you would need a standard task that evaluates your 2nd
approver(s), then using an if-clause you have to determine wheter your 1st
approver is among the 2nd approvers. If he is --> end the workflow else go
to second approval step.
 
Best regards
 
Helena Svanikier
Workflow Consultant SAP Switzerland
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Sauceman [mailto:sauceman at utk.edu]
Sent: Dienstag, 28. November 2000 15:35
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Excluded Agents?
 
 
Workflow Gurus,
 
I have the following situation in a release 4.6B Workflow:
 
In some cases within our organization, a person may occupy two distinct
positions within a given approval workflow. For example, a professor may be
both the Department Head of Chemistry and Acting Dean of the College of Arts
and Sciences. I have a workflow that requires the approval of the Department
Head followed by the approval of the Dean. For most departments, these are
two
different individuals and there is no problem. In a few cases, when this is
the same person, I would like for her/him to only have to approve the
document
one time (acting as either the Department Head or the Dean, but not both).
 
I thought that Excluded Agents was the obvious answer to this situation.
However, when I created a container table of previous agents who have
approved
the document, and specified this table as Excluded Agents, I got unexpected
results. I expected that since the Selected Agent (the Dean) was an Excluded
Agent because she/he had already approved the document (as the Department
Head), the system would simply mark the second work item as completed and
the
workflow would move on. However, the workflow stalled on the Dean Approval
step. I suspect that this was because the only Selected Agent was an
Excluded
Agent.
 
Am I misunderstanding the design concepts behind Excluded Agents? Is there a
way to achieve my desired results?
 
Jim Sauceman.............................sauceman at tennessee.edu
University of Tennessee..................Voice: (865) 974-2448
Manager, Database and Technical Support..Fax:   (865) 974-4810
Project IRIS Workflow Team Leader