This is one of the features provided by CMF, Plone and other ContentManagementSystems. It means that your [content objects]? have a state which can change to show their status, control their visibility, etc. For example: private, visible, published. There are a number of Products guide providing workflow features. Typically you can define multiple workflows, the states, and actions which are triggered during state transitions.
There are several alternative workflow engines for Zope, including DCWorkflow and AlphaFlow.