Every organization from the one-man outfit to the corporation with 10,000+ employees uses worflow at some level. It keeps a structure around production or services or products (or in our case, content). It enables administrators and managers to audit individual or team activity, and creates accountability. Workflow is essential.

Although I’m not going to discuss the technical details of how to implement workflow automation in your CMS (some of my best trade secrets would be revealed if I did!) I will tell you that it’s the cornerstone of a good CMS system. Whether you’re purchasing a CMS from your contracted webshop, purchasing something off the shelf, or developing for your own in-house or client project use, workflow automation must be at the foundation. Without good workflow automation, tasks which would be trivial become headaches. Data integrity becomes impossible to maintain, and quality will suffer.

There are plenty of CMS systems out there with advanced workflow automation built in. Some of the better open-source CMS systems utilize workflow automation, so you could - if you so desired - open them up and look at how it’s done. A good workflow automation CMS will include the following:

• A multi-user architecture
• User-specific & Content-specific auditing.
• Content locking
• Role-based permissions system
• Content versioning
• A system of failsafes to preserve data integrity - Example:
  (Deleting a product from the catalog might cause problems for users viewing orders for that product placed before the deletion. Maybe the deleted product was a related product for some other product. The relationship might still exist although the product does not.)
• Automated data backup and recovery

Building or purchasing the right workflow automation CMS system will dramatically improve the efficiency of your organization. If you’re a webshop, offering workflow automation to your clients is a huge upsell. If you’re doing it properly, it’s a build once, use everywhere solution, which can help you avoid selling the one-off solutions which makes us developers cringe.