DSpace workflows are great if all I have to do is throw a leash over a collection. I love them for that.
For everything else, they’re awful. Try explaining them to someone sometime. I’ve been adminning DSpace for close to two years, and even I still have to look up how they work. There are these three steps, you see, and in step one… It’s ungood. If you don’t believe me, read the docco for yourself.
Three review steps, fine, seems sensible. Groups of epeople, fine. Just don’t hard-code limits in what the epeople can do at a given step! That’s desperately confusing, and unnecessarily limits what can actually be done with DSpace workflows. (Why shouldn’t there be a single step at which reviewers can accept/reject and edit metadata and futz with files? I dunno, but the system doesn’t allow it.)
There’s occasional talk on the devel list about jettisoning the homegrown workflow system in favor of another open-source workflow library of some flavor or another. I’m all in favor, having just revised the collection-creation form at MPOW six times running because I can’t settle on a lucid way to explain the system to people…
