This document outlines the new features, improvements, bug fixes and other tasks included in this admation release.

Release Overview

The focus of the release was to add a new Rules Based approach to approval templates,

and to allow approval template to have locked/unlocked levels to assist with compliance.

Improvements

AD-22487 Approval Checklists > Add a rules-based system to select checklists

Previously, an approval checklist would be allocated to an approver if they were either from a specific organisation, had a specific permission level assigned to them, or they were in a specific user group. This was limiting in that organisations were unable to apply checklists for a specific asset type, or to NOT apply a checklist for a specific type of user. 

To counter this, we have added a Rules Based System to admation. This will allow administrators to specify a series of criteria that need to be met. This can be powerful when used for differing types of work. For example, assuming you had different checklists for print vs digital work, a checklist can be shown to an approver if;

1. the asset type is a website, banner ad or social post, and 

2. the user is from the legal team. 

Initially, administrators will be able to specify Asset Type, System Roles (permissions) and User Group Type, but this can be extended to account for other conditions, and applied to other parts of admation, in the future.

AD-22808 Approval Template > Allow individual levels in a template to be locked/unlocked

Approval templates have always been seen as a starting point, giving submitters a confirmed structure for their request. From there, they could freely modify the template, adding or removing recipients and even changing approval levels as needed.

For highly regulated industries, this was too flexible and posed a compliance risk. To counter this, we added a permission option which forced submitters to use unedited approval templates, but this was then seen as being too limited.

Today we are adding a middle ground to admation: Level Locking. When an administrator is creating/modifying an approval template, they will be able to

lock specific levels of that template. Now, when a submitter uses this template, the locked levels cannot be removed or edited in any way, but any unlocked levels can have

recipients modified. This will promote the usage of templates while giving submitters the flexibility to adjust only the components of the template that they should be able to edit.We think that this will also cut down the number of templates that are required by a business. For example, let’s say you have ten products your company sells, and the approval path for each product has a product manager on level 1, followed by Legal and Compliance teams on levels 2 and 3. Instead of creating and maintaining a unique approval template for each product, now you can have a single template and the submitter can apply the correct product manager when submitting work for that product.

In the sample below, only level 2 can be edited by the submitter so that they can apply the correct approvers for their region.

We think that having this restricted level of flexibility will prompt better usage of the approval templates amongst users, relieving a compliance issue that some organisations

have had.

Bug Fixes

AD-21245 Approvals > Cannot edit approvers if an Approval Level has an elapsed deadline

Occasionally, once an approval request has been made, the submitter may want to edit the recipients of the request. However, if an approval deadline was set on Approval Level

1 and it had passed, the submitter was no longer able to edit the approvers in this request. This has now been fixed.

AD-22681 Disable Option to Allow Leave > Leave can still be added in some places

Resolved an issue where users from an organisation which did not require leave to be added to admation still showed the leave options on some screens.

AD-22482 Approvals > Add the “Approval Group Changed” message to the simple view of the approval submission screen

The approval submission screen contains options to “Use Previous” or “Use Recent” to quickly set the approvers for this submission. However, it is possible that, since the

previous/recent submission was made, the users in the various user groups may have changed and would be sending this submission to an outdated set of recipients.

If you were submitting via the detailed Approvers Edit screen then you would see an alert to tell you that the users in the group had changed. However, this alert was not shown in the Simple View of the approvers. We have now ensured this alert is visible in both views.