You Have Workflow!

Workflow. People still ask for it occasionally. We pretend to ignore them in almost every case. "Workflow? What's that?" "Ohhh, the CMS doesn't do that. Sounds cool, though. Sorry!"

The fact of the matter is that workflow sounds wonderful to anal retentive micromanagement types, but the reality of workflow is an endless string of relentless emails requiring action on every trivial change. And no one, not even the most dedicated micro-manager has time - or the stomach for that.

For the few poor souls that we activated workflow for in our CMS, none of them lasted a week before they surrendered under the mountain of approval emails. We don't even offer it as a service, except when it is needed to keep certain people at arms distance from doing harm to our home page. For them, they think that workflow is what everyone goes through. Little do they know that we have consigned them to a special hell - the one reserved for child molesters and people who talk at theater*.

Workflows suck for all involved. Don't use them except for those rare cases where they actually make sense. Just don't. No.

*This is a Firefly reference, mostly directed at @Robin2go, who was going to present on Google Wave at HighEdWeb - before Google killed Wave, that is. Now she's going to present on the ephemeral nature of technologies.