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USING AND UNDERSTANDING WORKFLOWS IN DOCUMENT
MANAGEMENT FOR END USERS
Welcome to SharePoint Saturday Denver!#SPSDEN
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WHO AM I?
Kris Swanson
Twitter: @kris_swanson
Cell and Text: 720-331-4161
Email: [email protected]
Linked In: Kris Swanson
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INTENDED AUDIENCE
Information Workers
p.s. If you like Visual Studio you’ll probably be bored.
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WHAT IS A WORKFLOW?
• A series of tasks that produce an outcome.
• A SharePoint workflow is like an automated flowchart that takes a lot of the labor, guesswork, and randomness out of your standard work processes.
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BENEFITS
• Help organizations adhere to consistent business processes
• Improve organizational efficiency and productivity
• “Processes are central to any organization and workflow is the orchestrator of processes.” From Technet
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WORKFLOW QUESTIONS
• Is this the right workflow type?• One list or library, or the whole site collection? and One content
type, or all content types?• What’s a good name?• How (and by whom) can this workflow be started?• Do content types that inherit from this one also get this workflow?• Participants: Which people, in which order?• What additional information do participants need?• When are tasks due?• When does this workflow end?• Who needs to be notified?• Will this workflow control content approval?
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SHAREPOINT 2013 WORKFLOW
• My 1 techy slide…• Video link: http://
technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj227177 (Video start at 1:30 to 1:51)
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WORKFLOW OPTIONS
VS
3rd Party Tools
SharePoint Designer
5 Pre-Programmed in SharePoint
List and Library Settings
DELIVERING WORKFLOWS IN SHAREPOINT
Empowerment and Agility
Use out-of-the-box capabilities with configuration and customization.
Rapidly build and deploy business solutions without having to write code.
Sophistication and Control
Build or buy tailored solutions to address strategic requirements.
IT Managed SOLUTIONS
Power UserSOLUTIONS
Information Worker SOLUTIONS
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DOCUMENT APPROVAL WORKFLOW
Start
Send email to notify approvers
Approvers review
document
Notify author of approval
Publish
Notify author or rejection
End
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INFORMATION WORKER SOLUTIONS
What options?
• Alerts• Content Approval Settings
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5 PRE-PROGRAMMED IN SHAREPOINT
• Approval
– route a document or item for approval or rejection
– http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-help/all-about-approval-workflows-HA102771433.aspx?CTT=5&origin=HA102771434
• Collect Feedback
– route a document or item for feedback, consolidates and provides a record of the review process
• Collect Signatures
– routes a Microsoft Office document to designated people for their digital signatures (Word, Excel, InfoPath)
• Three-State
– track the status of a list item through three states (phases). It can be used to manage business processes that require organizations to track a high volume of issues or items — customer support issues, sales leads, or project tasks, for example.
• Publishing Approval
– automate content routing for review and approval. Designed specifically for publishing sites where the publishing of new and updated web pages is tightly controlled.
INFORMATION WORKER SOLUTIONS
DEMO
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INFORMATION WORKER SOLUTIONS
Pros Cons
Any user can use Not intuitive
Not flexible
Cannot start a workflow using “conditions”
Governance (users who start workflows can change workflow)
Vague email notifications
Rejection = completed
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INFORMATION WORKER SOLUTIONS
• Use Content Types to manage different types of documents and their approval cycles
• 2010 Example: http://bi.marquam.com/sites/workflows/procurement/
(Sorry, ran out of time to recreate in 2013)
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SHAREPOINT DESIGNER
• Information Worker or Power User?
• Risk: Exposes all site information to user. Many of these items your IT group do not want exposed, therefore many IT groups have not deployed SharePoint Designer.
• Risk: Be sure to add a “Stop Workflow” (from personal experience).
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SHAREPOINT DESIGNER AWARENESS
• Difficult to code in exception handling and error trapping.
• If something does go wrong, difficult to determine exactly where/why, and what needs to be done to clean things up and get things going again.
• Cannot insert inline comments to better document logic.
• Cannot assign the same task more than once (to more than one person, or to the same person twice).
• Workflow runs using initiator’s credentials.
• Cannot make changes to a workflow that is already in progress.
• Cannot promote workflows from dev to test to production.
• Workflow task dialogs do not allow
assignee to reassign to someone else.• Cannot revert to an earlier version of a
workflow (i.e. version control).• Not easy to programmatically manage the
permissions of an item throughout the lifecycle of a workflow.
• Need to use InfoPath (with Form Library) if request form is anything but very simple.
• No Lazy Approval• Hard to fully clean out a reference to an
old workflow task name.• Being able to easily display info from
request in task and vice-versa.• Cannot build complex logical conditions
using parenthesis.
SHAREPOINT DESIGNER
DEMO
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3RD PARTY TOOL COMPANIES
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3RD PARTY TOOLS - QUESTIONS
• Support – code upgrades– Bug fix availability
• Stability– Testing (load balanced, alternate browsers)– Impacts on core system
• Cost– Tool cost– Support cost– Internal support cost
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WORKFLOW TOOLS I LIKE
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WORKFLOW ISSUES
Issues Out of Box
SP Designer
3rd Party
Custom
Intuitive / X X
Flexible X X X
Conditional start X X X
Governance X X
Detailed Email X X X
Make changes while running X X
Error Handling X X
Promote from Dev-Test-Prod X X
Version History X X
Allow workflow loop logic X X X
Logs X X
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CUSTOM
• Developers love this
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RESOURCES
• Getting started with SharePoint 2013 workflow: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj227177
• About Workflows included in SharePoint: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-help/about-the-workflows-included-with-sharepoint-HA102771434.aspx
• Setup and Configure SharePoint 2013 Workflow Manager: (techy link) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163276
• Workflow development in SharePoint Designer 2013 and Visio 2013: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163272
• Workflow Actions in SharePoint Designer 2013: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj164026.aspx#bkm_WorkflowActions
• Nintex: http://www.nintex.com/en-US/Products/Pages/NintexWorkflow.aspx
