SharePoint Designer 2010 - Workflow question

N03L 1 Reputation point
2021-05-18T16:06:47.447+00:00

I'm trying to automate a manual process that causes one person rather a lot of work each month.
The simple gist of it is that she exports the contents of a doc library (SharePoint 2010 Publishing Site) to Excel where she filters and groups the sheet before using that to list all of the docs that need to be reviewed before the end of this month.
She produces an email that she includes the filtered results of her export to Excel and sends that email to each business head and a bunch of other recipients.
After 3 weeks, if the review has not been completed, she'll send another 'chasing' email, to the same recipients.

My intention was to create a simple multi-stage approval workflow using a separate list (as a Lookup) that has the various email recipients associated with the Business Area.
My concern now is that having over 4000 documents in the library and each one having to be the focus of the workflow means that the 'Pause Until' action that I'd need to include for it to be truly automated would have 4000 instances running all the time, impacting Timer Service performance and generating far too much traffic between WFE's and DB's.
I'm not a developer in the sense that I could open Visual Studio and write this another way so I've tried to create a view that could be used as a digest for each manager who needs to complete the document review but even that doesn't seem accessible in a workflow action.
It's been a while since I had to think like this so some of the issue is in my approach but if anyone can provide any thoughts on what seems like such a simple process, I'd love to hear from you.
It's awfully lonely when you're the only SharePoint guy in a team of over 40.

N03L.

SharePoint Workflow
SharePoint Workflow
SharePoint: A group of Microsoft Products and technologies used for sharing and managing content, knowledge, and applications.Workflow: An orchestrated and repeatable pattern of business activity, enabling data transformation, service provision, and information retrieval.
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  1. Emily Du-MSFT 43,661 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor
    2021-05-19T08:55:15.203+00:00

    @N03L
    In my opinion, you could create multiple approval workflows, associating an approval workflow with about 100 documents.

    For example, you could create a column named tag, then fill in the value, assign a different value to each hundred documents. In the approval workflow, add a condition, if tag = value.

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