Getting Produce material into an approval project

Material built in Produce does not have to be downloaded and uploaded again to be approved. A template can be wired straight into a Plan approval project, so every document made from it goes for review on its own.

This article covers that setup and the send. It applies to every kind of Produce material: documents, emails, banners and videos. What changes between them is the template, not the workflow.

Before you start

You need rights to edit the template in Produce, and an approval project to send to. The project must be a Produce approval project in Plan. Place approval projects do not appear in the picker, because they take material from a Place archive instead.

Set the template to use Plan

1. Open Produce and go to Templates.
2. Point at the template, click the three dots and choose Settings.
3. Open the Workflows tab.
4. Choose Advanced.
5. Click Select project, pick the approval project, then Confirm.
6. Click Save.

There are three choices on this tab, and they decide what happens to every document made from the template:

• None. Documents can be used without approval and simply appear in Produce.
• Simple. Documents start at In Progress. Someone marks them Pending Review, and anyone with enough access sets them to Ready, which releases the final assets for download. Plan is not involved.
• Advanced. Documents follow the workflow of the Plan project you pick, and the whole approval runs in Plan.

Create the material

1. In Produce, click New document on the template.
2. Fill in the content and click Save.

With a workflow on the template, the document is created at status In progress.

Send it for review

1. Go to Documents and select the document.
2. In the panel that opens on the right, click Approval.
3. If the panel says the assets have not been generated, click Generate assets and wait. Request review is not available until the assets exist.
4. Click Request review.

You get the message Review requested in the associated Plan project. The document moves to Pending review, its Edit button becomes View while the review is open, and the review appears in the Plan project ready for an approver.

The statuses you will see

There are two sets of statuses and it helps to keep them apart.

On the document in Produce: In progress, Pending review, Needs change, Rejected, Ready. Ready is where an approved document ends up, and it is what releases the final files.

On the review in Plan: the approver works with Pending review, Approve document, Needs change and Reject document. See Approving and rejecting material in an approval project.

If changes are requested

The approver comments and sets the review to Needs change, as described in Sending material back to the initiator for changes. Back in Produce, open the document, make the changes, save, generate the assets again and request review again. The review continues on the new version rather than starting over.