Hi,
Anybody can answer, what is the way to start the terminated workflow from the same place where it was terminated???
Terminated Workflow instances cannot be restarted. You can, however, start a new instance on the same document. Depending on how you set up your wait conditions, it is possible to have it automatically go through the first steps and wait in the same step where it was before. You can't start in a step in the middle.
We have around 10 users has to approve for a particular document. As per your suggestion, after 8 users, if the workflow got terminated, then once again these 8 persons has to approve once again which is not practical as these users are managers. So we need a solution for this. Please help.
It's hard to make a good suggestion without seeing the workflow. There isn't one single way to get documents through an approval process in Workflow, so your question is a bit too general for a straight answer. The solution would depend on how the approval conditions are set up.
For example, say you have a workflow that sends a document to users A and B and waits for each on of them to set a field value. Say user A set his field value, but B did not and then instance terminated. When you restart the process, your field value for user A would still be set, so Workflow would consider that condition already satisfied and not send the document to user A for approval again. However, if you reset the field values before restarting the process, Workflow would wait for both users again.
If you do know where your Workflow might terminate ahead of time (for example, if you expect that an email activity might terminate the Workflow if the email server fails) then you could put that activity inside a Try/Catch activity and it will continue in the catch branch after it would have otherwise terminated the Workflow.
You can also try Task Error Handlers via the Workflow Administration Console if you know which errors you are expecting ahead of time.
When my VAR helped me create a new Contract Management process that included multiple levels, he and I discussed the value of workflows that were broken up into sections. What could be done, is have WF1, WF2, WF3 etc for each step. When WF1 finishes after the first approval, it moves the document into a new folder as its last step, lets say to Folder 2. The document being dropped (by WF1) into the next folder will kick off WF2. When WF2 finishes, it drops the document into Folder 3 and WF3 is kicked off. Etc, Etc, all the way down.
If you set it up this way, any time a termination happens, you can correct what caused the termination and then manually move the document into the target folder where you want the process to restart.
This is the folder structure that we user for our multi-WF process: