Publishing & Unpublishing
Publishing controls whether your process can be run and shared, and which version of the process new runs see.
Publishing a process
A process must be published before it can be:
- Run by you or your team
- Shared via link or email
- Scheduled to run automatically
To publish, open your process in the editor and click Publish in the top right, or go to the process overview and publish from there.
Unpublishing a process
Unpublishing prevents new runs from being started. Runs that are already in progress are not affected.
To unpublish, click Unpublish from the process editor or overview.
Draft vs Published
- Draft — Only visible to you in the process library. Cannot be run or shared.
- Published — Available to run, share, and schedule. Visible to your team in the process library.
Unpublished changes
Once a process is published, any edits you make put it back into a draft-edits state. You’ll see an amber Unpublished changes indicator in the editor while these edits are pending.
Click Publish changes to push your edits live. Until you do:
- New runs continue to use the last published version — your in-progress edits don’t leak into runs.
- Anyone using a run link still sees the last published version.
This means it’s safe to leave a process half-edited mid-day. Nothing breaks for the people running it — they just see the previous version until you’re ready to publish.
Version snapshots
Every time you publish, NextStep takes a frozen snapshot of your process — every task, field, section, and setting at that moment. New runs always read from the latest snapshot, not from the live editor state.
This is what makes the Unpublished changes behaviour above possible, and it’s the foundation for syncing changes down to runs that are already in progress (see below).
Pushing changes to runs that are already in progress
Editing the published process doesn’t automatically change runs that are already running. To push your updates down to active runs, use Sync from template (single run) or Sync N active runs (all of them).
NextStep will also prompt you to sync automatically right after you publish, whenever there are active runs.
See Syncing Changes to Active Runs for the full guide.