# Send documents to a work queue

Route a document to a person or team with Send to Work Queue — the two-toggle dialog, what lands in the recipient's Work tab, and how items move between queues and leave them.

Product: content-central · Versions: 7.x · Audience: user · Time: 10 minutes · Last verified: 2026-09-05

Canonical: https://help.ademero.com/content-central/workflow/send-documents-to-a-work-queue

**At the end of this guide you can put a document in front of the person who needs to act on it — into their work queue, with an expiration if the task shouldn't linger — and you'll know what they see and how the item eventually leaves.**

A work queue is a person's (or group's) to-do pile of documents. There's nothing to create first — every user and group has one, implicitly; sending is what fills it.

## Send one

1. In the document's actions menu (under **Send & Route**), choose **Send to Work Queue**. Multi-select works too — the same action from the selection toolbar sends the batch.

2. The dialog is two toggles and their consequences:
   
   - **Send to my queue** — on by default. Turn it off to reveal the **Users** and **Groups** pickers; select at least one recipient. (Sending to a *group* puts one item in the group's shared pile — first member to take it, takes it.)
   - **Never expires** — on by default. Turn it off for **Expires in** + **Interval** (minutes through years) when the item should age out rather than haunt the queue forever.

3. Click **Send**. The confirmation counts what happened — "Sent 2 of 2 documents to work queue" — and *tells you* when permissions filtered some out ("…skipped because you do not have permission to assign work for those document types").

> **NOTE:** The defaults mean a zero-thought send goes **to your own queue, never expiring** — the "deal with this later" bookmark. Routing to someone else is always the deliberate second click.

## What the recipient sees

The **Work Queue** entry in the left menu (and the Work Queue dashboard widget) opens the **Queues** page on its **Work** tab: each item with its document, catalog and type, **Assigned By**, **Date Received**, and **Expiration**. From the row they can view, download, and work the document — and the queue-specific actions:

- **Copy to Queue(s)** / **Move to Queue(s)** — pass items along: copy leaves it in your queue, move removes it. The dialog mirrors the send dialog (recipients + expiration).
- **Remove from Queue** — how an item *leaves*. Done with the task? Remove it. There's no separate "complete" step — removal is completion.

Sending is permission-gated per document type (**Allow Work-Queue Assignment**); if the action is missing or documents get skipped, that's the permission to ask your administrator about.

**Success check:** send a test document to a colleague with a 1-day expiration. It appears in their Work tab with you as **Assigned By** and tomorrow as **Expiration**; when they remove it, it's gone from the queue — and the document's history shows the queue arrival and departure.

## What's next

- [Manage work queues](https://help.ademero.com/content-central/workflow/manage-work-queues)
- [Build workflow rules: triggers and actions](https://help.ademero.com/content-central/workflow/workflow-rules-triggers-and-actions)