Integrate Document Viewing as part of a SharePoint Workflow – a Tutorial

Does your organization have a need for remote indexing of scanned documents? Do you have a QA process as part of the scanning process? SharePoint can be used to create simple or advanced workflows that automate document-centric business processes. With the help of the Vizit SP, document viewing can be a seamless part of your workflow. This article provides a simple example of how to add document viewing as part of your SharePoint workflow.

SharePoint Designer, now available from Microsoft for free, can be used to create fairly sophisticated workflows without writing any code. We’ll use SharePoint designer to create a simple workflow that sends an email to a designated account when a new scanned TIFF or PDF document is submitted to a library. The email will include a URL that when clicked on will open the newly scanned document stored in SharePoint in the zero-footprint Vizit Viewer without downloading the document to the client.

After opening your site in SharePoint designer, create a new workflow from the File : New : Workflow menu. You will then be presented with a dialog to you enter the workflow name, and a list of start options. We want to start the workflow automatically when a new document is submitted, to select that and give your workflow a name.

We only want an email sent if a scanned document is submitted, so  add a condition that will only perform the action if the file type is PDF or TIFF.

The action should be set to “send an email”. Clicking the “this message” link will display a form to set the send to address, subject, and body. We’ll use this form to include a hyperlink to the view the document.

In the To: field, include the email address you wish to send the document to (you can also include a group in SharePoint by selecting the address book icon). The body of the email is where we include a link to the document.

For the link, include the URL of the SharePoint server, where “servername” is the name of your SharePoint server. Vizit SP is installed as a feature in SharePoint, therefore the viewer application is located in the “_layouts” area. We need to pass in the Encoded URL of the document so the viewer knows which document to open. The URL, should look like this:

http://servername/_layouts/vizit/viewer/?u=

To obtain the Encoded URL, click the “Add Lookup to Body” button, and choose the “Encoded Absolute URL” field, then click OK.

Your link should now look similar to this:

http://servername/_layouts/vizit/viewer/?u=[%Documents:Encoded Absolute URL%]

Click Finish, and you’re done! Scan or upload a document to the library in SharePoint with the new workflow, and the approver will receive an email with the link to the document. When the viewer opens, you’ll be able to edit the index fields, add annotations, rotate pages, and clean-up the document.

Download Vizit SP to Integrate Zero-Footprint document viewing inside a SharePoint Workflow.