May I use Approval Process with Contacts ?

[elreneson]

Hi everyone,

I've been exploring the approval processes in salesforce and as far as I could see it seems like a record can only be submitted for approval to a "User" (different users and ways to pick them up ... but)

In my case I need a record to be approved or rejected by Contacts. How could I take advantage of the Approval Process included in salesforce? Do I have to implement a customized approval process? 

Ideally I would like to have the same existing functionally but to be able to use contacts as well (or some email address field in another object.

Any suggestions are apreciated.

Thanks !!

[jkucera]

How would the contacts access the approval?  Did you want to use the partner portal or Sites?

[elreneson]

Hi Mr. Kucera,

Thank you for your response, I am sorry to be late.

Actually I was thinking to do something like that. Another option I was evaluating is send to the specific contact a .pdf document with the content requiring approval, and at the same time use the email mechanism to get the approval.

Is there any way I can use that email approval mechanism with contacts?

Thanks again !

[jkucera]

If these people are using the partner portal, then you can do approvals using standard workflow approvals:

https://na1.salesforce.com/help/doc/user_ed.jsp?section=help&target=partner_portal_about.htm&loc=help&hash=topic-title

If you wanted to them to simply reply to an email by typing "approved", you could custom build something using Email to Apex where the response would be forwarded to Salesforce & then you'd have code that would search the reply for "approved" or "not approved".

The partner portal route is probably easier to set up given no code involved.

[elreneson]

Thanks very much for your help !, I'll check both alternatives.

[jpalk]

Using the Partner Portal, I still haven't been able to get a Partner User to be the the approver, even if they are the record owner. A partner user can be the initial submitter. I simply can't get partner users to appear in the 'Next Approver' box.

[adi kuruganti]

if you want the partner to approve a request - submit the request to a Queue of which the partner is a member. The partner will then see the approval request in the portal and can approve it accordingly. You can't directly assign an approval request to a partner