Information for authors and managers

Everyone you invite must have a Polarion user account, and have permission to read Documents in the project. Otherwise, they cannot to see your Document and receive an error message if they follow a link leading to it. All reviewers must also be assigned the project role that has been granted the SIGN/DECLINE permission for Documents. Otherwise, they do not appear in the list of people you can invite to review and sign your Document.

1. Open the Document in the Document Editor, and open the Signatures sidebar.

   The sidebar shows a panel labeled with the name of the workflow action that requires signatures. In the case of our running example, that would be Mark Approved.

2. Click the action name. The sidebar shows two page tabs and a button.

   

   Signature policy

   Invite people to sign

3. Click Invite for Signature.

   In the dialog, select the first user you want to invite from the user names in the drop-down list.

4. If you want to invite another user, click the icon, select the user in the list, and click again.

   Repeat until you have added all the users you want to invite.

   Tip:

   You cannot invoke the transition action until the configured signature policy is satisfied. For example, if the policy requires all invited users to sign, the action cannot be invoked until all have logged a signature. If it requires that at least one must sign and none must decline, then that condition must be satisfied in order to invoke the action.

   You can view the signature policy in the All Signatures tab of the Signatures sidebar, shown after you click an action name. See the previous figure.

5. At the bottom of the dialog, select the URL in the Link for Invitees text box and copy it to your clipboard.

6. Click OK to close the dialog, and then click Save.

7. Open your email client program, or internet chat, etc. and compose a message to all the people you invited, asking them to review and sign the document. Paste the URL from your clipboard into the message body.

The following figure illustrates an email message to invite people to review and sign a Document.

When sending a message to your reviewers, include the Document URL. Paste the Document URL from the Invite for Signature dialog box.

Your administrator can predefine the list of invitees for any Document workflow action, so that the Document owner/manager does not have to add invitees manually for every new Document. Invitees can be added according to their user role in the project, or explicitly by their user ID. You might want to consider having custom user roles defined for your project and have those roles assigned to the people who routinely review and approve specifications or other kinds of Documents.

You can monitor the progress of collecting signatures in the Signatures sidebar of your Document. The sidebar shows which invitees have signed, which have declined, and the names of all invitees.

The All Signatures tab of the sidebar shows this same information, plus the signature policy.

If the signature policy is currently satisfied, a message displays indicating this. A link is provided that opens the Document Properties sidebar. You can then invoke the action to transition the Document in the Status field, where the action is enabled. Be sure to save the Document after changing the field.

Sometimes feedback from invited signers reveals that additional work on the Document is necessary. In that case, another round of reviews needs to be started. The Document owner/manager can reset signature status of Signed or Rejected for the current workflow transition back to the Pending state by clicking on the X icon on the right part of the signature Statistics. The Reset action is available only in the All Signatures panel for a specific workflow transition — the is, not in My Signatures, and not in Entry Point). It is not available after the Document status has been transitioned. You can see recalculated signature statistics immediately without saving the Document.

In cases where a Document needs to be reworked, or a signature was declined, the author or owner may decide that signatures up to that point are obsolete and a new round of reviews and signatures is needed on a new, reworked Document version. To accommodate such scenarios, an administrator can configure the workflow action that sends the Document back to the authoring status — Back to Draft) to run a workflow function that marks the current signatures as obsolete.

After all signatures needed to satisfy the signature policy have been logged, the Signatures sidebar displays a message indicating that the Document can now be transitioned to the next Status. You as the Document owner, author or manager must explicitly take this action.

Transition the signed Document:

1. Open the Document Properties sidebar.

2. Click the drop-down control of the Status field.

3. Select the signed workflow action in the list. The list item should now be enabled.

4. Save the Document.

As you can see in the above figure, when signature policy is satisfied, the workflow transition action is enabled.