Hello all,

Just wanted to preface this by saying hello to everyone in the community.  Looking forward to getting a better understanding of this tool from the experts.

I'm trying to start very small, and I've made some progress so far but running into some roadblocks.

We have a Sharepoint Discussion board that is currently being used for a quazi workflow process.  The process is started when a request (email with attachment) is sent and a discussion is started.

We have columns that represent different statuses.  One is for the overall status of the request (New, Pending, Released, Closed), and one is for the Approval Status (Blank, Approved, Rejected).

When a new item comes in, it has a Status of New and Approval Status of Blank.  At this point, our process splits and happens in parrallel.  One branch is the item being worked by one group (they are the one pushing the item through and changing the Status field), and the other branch is the Approval process (a different group will handle this).  These branches later converge, and the first group will check to see if a request is approved.  If its approved, they will continue to work the item.  If its rejected, all work stops.

Currently we are not using any forms, everything is manually changed within the Sharepoint Discussion/item.  Email alerts are sent throughout the process so people know what is going on with an item, and we did build a small custom workflow to handle the approval process.  Basically an email is sent to the group who can approve, there's a link to a task that's created, they open the task and approve or reject, and complete task.  This will then update the Approval Status accordingly.

Sorry for the novel, but I need to explain our process before I can try to relate this to K2.  In K2 Studio, I've created my project and workflow.  I've linked the workflow to a custom Sharepoint content type we created that has the attributes we want.  It's basically a discussion content type with a few custom columns we need (Status, Approval Status, etc).

At the start of the workflow, I have it set to begin when an item of this content type is created.  The next step I have an activity with an email event that sends an email letting the appropriate people know that a new item has been created.

Here is where I have a few questions:

1)  When I was linking my workflow to the content type, there was a step to map the metadata.  What do I need to do here and what will this allow me to do?

2) When I sent my first alert email, I wanted to leverage some of the xml fields that are populated with the relevant sharepoint data.  Something simple here, just a link to the discussion, maybe show who the originator/author was, etc.  Do I need to do anything to make sure these xml fields populate or will it happen automatically because I linked my workflow to the content type?

3) Haven't gotten this far yet, but for now we want to keep this process/workflow very simple.  I don't really want the users to have to use forms to update the items in the discussion, its actually easier for them to just do them in the discussion board themselves.  But we would like to use K2 to monitor the changing of the Status field and send emails as necessary, and to also handle the entire Approval process (send email with link to item, maybe allow them to approve/reject right from email, etc).  Not really sure how to handle this or where to begin.

4) Smartobjects - I get what these are high level, but I'm not understanding how these would work in this scenario.  My guess would be that data from each discussion could be pulled into a smartobject, and this will allow me to action off of that data in my processes in K2.  I have no idea how to do this or if I even need to.

This is a lot of info for people to weed through, I probably should have broken it down into separate questions/threads.  I appreciate if anyone has anything to offer for any of my questions though.

Thanks in advance.