Approval concepts

An approval is an item or group of items that approvers review and respond to, either by approving, suggesting changes, or denying. The approval process makes sure the right people view and sign off on content, creatives, and marketing objects.

The approval process is the lifecycle of an approval. It is set up by a project owner, and contains all the details about what to approve, who approves, and when to approve. Typically, an approval goes through four stages: it is created, submitted, active, and completed. The system notifies the required approvers by sending alerts and emails. The approvers can pose comments or questions before they decide. And when the approval is completed (either approved or denied) the approval owner or reviewer gets notified about the results.

An approval owner is the person who created the approval. Normally, the owner has all of the capabilities that are associated with the approval, such as being able to delete it or change its status. However, this feature set can be different depending on the security policy that is associated with the approval.

An approver is someone who is designated to review a particular deliverable and approve or deny it. There are several ways an approver can be designated:

• Add the person directly to the approval process itself.

  Add the person as a reviewer to the project. This procedure can auto-populate approval processes that are created from the workflow, depending on how your administrator set up the project templates.

A required approver is an approver who is designated as required, as opposed to optional. For an approval process to be marked complete, all required approvers must respond to the approval.

An approval round indicates how many times an approval is submitted. The first time an approval owner submits an approval, its round number is 1. The system increments the round number each time the approval is resubmitted.