Full User Approvals

As a Hornbill Platform subscribed user, the built-in workflow approval scheme supports weighting/consensus voting with multi-approver participation. As an alternative (depending on your specific needs), you can also use Human Tasks for approvals. Human tasks, do not support weighting/consensus voting with multi-approver participation. However, Human Tasks do allow you to define up to eight individual fully customizable outcomes, each outcome can include pre-and-post outcome custom forms to collect/capture simple or complex additional input from each approver, including custom information specific to each individual outcome. Basically, this is the highly configurable, flexible approval system and is the RollsRoyce of the approval capabilities offered by the Hornbill Workflow system. However, in order to have these types of approvals or tasks assigned to you, you must be subscribed as a full platform user. See User Accounts for the various user account types that the Hornbill Platform defines.

External Approvals

External approvals are simple approval requests, referred to as external approvals because they can only be delivered to the approver via email. Unlike Full User Approvals, you are not required to be a subscribed platform user to receive and complete one of these approval requests, anyone can be sent an approval for completion via email, but as a consequence the functionality offered with these capabilities is far simpler and more limited. The limitations include: -

• Non-Customizable Hornbill Branded Presentation: The email template sent, and the subsequent web page opened up from the link in the email for the approver to complete is Hornbill branded, fixed, non-customizable presentation.
• Limited Information: The information provided to the approver in the form of text is limited to 1000 characters, it is not possible to extend or change this size, and the information sent to the user is a snapshot at the point in time the approval is sent to the user, and is non-editable.
• Limited Outcomes: Unlike Full User Approvals, there are two fixed outcomes Approve or Reject plus one more optional customizable outcome that can be configured for an approval request.

Although external approvals are less capable than Full User Approvals, External approvals are very comparable with the vast majority of service desk and workflow systems that support approvals. In practice, if you are not trying to collect structured data from an approver at the point of approval that needs a custom form, most workflows that require approvals will find this level of approval capability more than adequate.

Choosing the Right Approval Model

Hornbill provides two approval models because different approval scenarios have different requirements. Full User Approvals and External Approvals are not simply different editions of the same feature; they are designed for different use cases, different user relationships, and different security models.

Full User Approvals are platform approvals for authenticated Hornbill users. The approval is tied directly to the user’s Hornbill account and is therefore governed by the platform’s access control, session timeout, audit, task management, notification, and accountability mechanisms. This is the appropriate model when an approval forms part of a controlled internal business process and the approver is expected to act as a known, authenticated participant in that process.

External Approvals are different by design. An external approval is sent to an email address rather than assigned to a Hornbill user account. There is no guaranteed relationship between the target email address and a Hornbill user account, even if a basic or full user happens to have the same email address on their user profile. The security model is based on delivering a time-limited approval token to the intended email address at that point in time. From that point onwards, possession of that token is what authorizes the approval action.

This distinction is important when considering approval visibility inside authenticated areas of the platform, such as an Employee Portal “My Approvals” widget. For full platform users, a “My Approvals” view aligns naturally with the internal approval model because those approvals are assigned to the authenticated user account. For External Approvals, the only practical correlation would be to match the approval email address to the email address recorded on a user’s profile. Hornbill does not treat a profile email address as a security boundary for approval access, and even where email addresses are currently unique, that should not be relied on as the basis for enforcing approval security.

For this reason, External Approvals are not presented as account-linked internal approvals. Doing so could create an experience that appears to be access-controlled and fully auditable through the authenticated user account, while the underlying approval is still secured by an email-delivered token.

In practical terms, the two approval models should be selected as follows:

• Full User Approvals: Use when secure access control, auditability, structured task management, and richer workflow participation are required for authenticated platform users.
• External Approvals: Use for simple approval requests to people outside the platform, or where an email-delivered, token-based approval is sufficient for the process being automated.

External Approvals can be used for people inside an organization if that approach suits the process, but the associated security posture, user experience, and functional limitations should be understood. Where the requirement is for a structured, account-based “My Approvals” experience for internal users, that requirement aligns with the Full User Approval model rather than the External Approval model.

Hornbill preserves this distinction to keep the approval models clear, secure, and predictable. The Full User Approval model provides the account-based workflow approval capability; the External Approval model provides a simpler token-based mechanism for approvers who do not need to be subscribed platform users.

If you need more than what the external approvals offers but do not feel that the cost of having secure user accounts for this purpose is workable for your organization, this is not a roadmap question to make the token-based approvals work more like the account-based approvals, its a commerical conversation you should have with your Hornbill account manager.