out-of-the-box it is not supported by Liferay. You have to customize liferay code to achieve what you need - of course you need use ext plugins for this.
Here are the steps you need to do
> You need to change the service.xml of software catalog to support workflow functionality
> You many need to change the liferay-portlet.xml to have a entry for workflow-handler element
> Relevant Impl (XXXLocalServiceImpl & XXXServiceImpl) classes for software catalog to support workflow (For this check default portlets which are supporting workflow)
If somebody has better ideas they can always share their inputs.
