15.1 Introduction

Issuing is a new concept in Business Collaborator version 4.9. It formalises the exchange of documents which is possible by default in Business Collaborator by enabling the issuer to create meaningful groupings of documents and to request and obtain responses from a number of people.
The documents which are to be issued together comprise an issue. An issue has an Issue Sheet which shows details of the issue and provides a route to the majority of actions on the issue. The group of people amongst whom the issue is circulated is defined by its Distribution List.

From creation to completion, the lifecycle of an issue can be summarised as:

• create the issue - usually by selecting the documents to be issued
• identify the people on the Distribution List
• assign the details of the issue
• modify the issue details and distribution list as necessary
• send out the issue
• users respond to the issue
• users complete their actions on the issue
• the issue is completed by the person who created it

The Issue Sheet (see section 15.2.4 - The Issue Sheet) is the page displaying all current information relating to the issue and from which the majority of actions on an issue are performed (see section 15.2.3 - The Issue Details). On the Issue Sheet, a progress bar indicates the stage of the issue in the lifecycle set out above, the stage being one of Set Distribution, Set Details, Not Sent, Open and Closed.

Note

Only documents can be issued, not other Business Collaborator object types such as folders (see section 3.4) or discussions (see section 5.2).