Tech Support: Activate out-of-the-box Workflow for Document Library in Project Site
In PWA Project Site sometime the out-of-the-box Workflow 2010 (WF2010) for document library approval is not enabled by default (as below).
And when you try to enable it from the site collection feature, you could get an error message.
The Solution to Activating Document Library:
- Navigate to Site Settings >> Manage site collection features
- Find and activate the workflows site collection feature
“Aggregated set of out-of-box workflow features provided by SharePoint” - If you find that the feature is already activated, then you need to deactivate it and then reactivate it again.
When you try to reactivate this feature, you may get the below error message
“A list, survey, discussion board, or document library with the specified title already exists in this Web site. Please choose another title”
Steps to Activate Document Library:
- Open SharePoint designer2013
- Connect to your PWA site
- Go to “All Files” >> _catalogs
- Find the folder “wfpub” and rename it
- Go to the PWA URL
- Navigate to Site Settings >> Manage site collection features
- Activate the workflow feature “Aggregated set of out-of-the-box workflow features provided by SharePoint”
This should now resolve the issue.
More Tech Support Articles!
Interested in more Tech Support articles? Check out these:
- Solving Workflow’s Invalid Data Error
- Extracting the PWA Security Group Usernames
- Activating out-of-the-box Workflow 2010 for Document Library
For more information on PPM solutions, and how you can better utilise applications in the Microsoft Ecosystem, have a browse of our blog, or reach out to our PPM experts!
IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace
Step 01
Introduce
You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.
Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.
Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.
Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.
Step 02
Integrate
The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.
Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.
Direction 01
Enterprise systems
Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.
Direction 02
The tools PMs already use
The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.
The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.
Step 03
Replace
Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.
Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.
Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.
A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.
Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.
The payoff
You stop producing reports and start reading them
Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.
That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.
Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.
pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.