Mark Stokes

I recently received this query from a colleague and thought the answer would be usefull for others:

Hi Mark,

Could you share with me a print-screen of how a work-flow is configured in SP-2007?

I am wondering to know the level of detail we can set in the system to program a work-flow such as sequential authorizations, parallel authorizations, etc.

Thank you in advance,

A. Colleague

That is a really difficult request to answer. Workflow is so big in SharePoint that there isn’t really a screen shot that can be taken of all the options.

Workflows can be created in SharePoint Designer and there are a initial number of Conditions and Actions that are available, however it is possible to write new Conditions and Actions for use in our workflow, which means what we can do in workflow is limited only to the code that we can write.

When looking at the live Global Collaboration Portal we are not going to be using SharePoint Designer for our workflows (not initially at least) for a number of reasons, but mainly because Workflows created using SharePoint Designer can only be used against the one single list that it is assigned to when created. This makes creating and testing workflows in a development environment very tricky as once the workflow has been tested it needs to be recreated by hand, from scratch in the new next environment along (Local, Dev, UAT, Production, etc) which gives us the risk of human error in recreating them, and no clear path to re-install in a DR environment, let alone reuse in another area of the site.

Later in the life of the Global Collaboration Portal we may allow Power Users to create workflows in this way for small workflows that are only appropriate in that area, with larger workflows being created in Visual Studio.

This brings us nicely onto the preferred approach, which is to create our workflows in Visual Studio. This alleviates many of the issues outlined above, but does carry a higher development cost. Our workflows created in Visual Studio are contained in a Source Control application, can be compiled and deployed to many different environments, and many different lists and document libraries in those environments.

When creating these types of workflow, we start with a blank canvas allowing us to model any process we can imagine (in bother sequential and state-machine workflows) and have the same (including a few other) Conditions and Actions available to us that we had with out SharePoint Designer workflows, and again we can write new Conditions and Actions to cover situations not covered by out-of-the box modules.