Background

Not everyone on our staff is allowed to make edits to profiles in order to make sure our data remains clean. One of the issues we ran into was that our Congregational Care Coordinator was having to notify us when someone passed so we could inactivate the profile and mark the person as deceased. To allow our congregational care coordinator to have complete ownership of the processes in her area, a workflow was created where she can enter the deceased date and the person is automatically marked as deceased.

As a note, our church has always kept deceased individuals in their household so this workflow does not include a step for removing them from their current household, although you could modify the instructions to do that.

How-To

Create a workflow with the following attributes:

1. Person (field type: person)
2. Deceased Date (field type: date)

Under the start activity, set the person using the "Attribute Set from Entity". This will be important since the workflow will be launched from the profile. Add a form to allow the deceased date to be entered. Using "Person Property Update" several times, update the record status to inactive, set the inactive reason to deceased, update the connection status if needed (we have a connection status of "Deceased" so we can make sure those individuals aren't pulled onto reports), and set "Is Deceased" to true. To set the deceased date, you will need to use an "Entity Property Set". The property name is "DeceasedDate" and the property value attribute is the workflow attribute "Deceased Date"; make sure to ignore empty values.

Once you have the workflow saved, go to a profile and select the block configuration. Select the settings for "Person Bio" and add the new workflow under the "Workflow Actions". The new workflow can be launched from the profile of the deceased individual.

I hope this allows your staff the freedom to make simple updates to a profile without having to have the rights to edit a profile.