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How to develop maintainable custom

workflows in Office 365/SharePoint Online?

Prashant G Bhoyar (PGB)

New Jersey SharePoint User Group

28 June 2016

#NJSPUG @pgbhoyar

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• Senior Consultant at Portal Solutions

• Born and raised in India

• Came to United States of America in 2007 for studies

• University of Maryland College Park Alumni

• Technical Reviewer of the book “Pro : SharePoint 2013 Administration”

• Organizer of SharePoint Saturday Baltimore (SPSBMORE)

• Founder and Organizer of DC-Metro Office 365 User Group Monthly in person & online event

http://www.meetup.com/DC-Metro-Office-365-User-Group/

• Recipient of Antarctic Service Medal

Who AM I ?

Prashant G Bhoyar (PGB)

#NJSPUG @pgbhoyar

Amazing Antarctica Adventure – November/December 2008

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Amazing Antarctica Adventure – November/December 2008

• McMurdo Station, Antarctica (US Government Station)

• 1000-1100 people stays during Antarctic Summer (November to February)

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About Portal Solutions

We deliver Digital

Workplace Products

and Solutions that help

organizations share

what they know and

find what they need by

connecting people,

data, and content.

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OneWindow Workplace

• OneWindow Is Built On Office 365 and Microsoft Azure

• Available for Office 365 and SharePoint Hybrid environment

OneWindow

YammerSharePoint

OnlineSkype For Business Office Groups Office Graph/Delve

VideosOneDrive for

Business

OneWindow APIs

Planner

Analytics

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What Do You Get With OneWindow Workplace?7

Amazing Experiences

• News

• Workspaces

• Knowledge Discovery

• People Directory

• Search

• Activity Feeds

• Tools and Apps

• Widgets

Platform

• Integration

• Lync/Skype

• Yammer

• OneDrive

• Office Graph

• Office Groups

• SharePoint

• Videos

• Analytics and

Personalization

Access Anywhere

• Responsive

• Native applications

(Mobile, Windows 10)

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Next Steps

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Interested in assessing if OneWindow Workplace

is right for you?

Let’s talk. Click here or go to http://www.onewindowapp.com to learn more.

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• Sharing is Caring

• Ask Questions Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The

important thing is not to stop questioning. –Albert Einstein

• Let the learning begins…

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About Today’s Session

Image Source : http://onlyfreewallpaper.com/view/smiley-kitty-1280x1024.html

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• Intro of Office 365 / SharePoint Online Workflows

• Future

• Key Differences between SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010 style workflows

• Tips for writing maintainable workflows

• Throttling Limits in Office 365

• Limitations

• Q&A

Agenda

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#NJSPUG @pgbhoyar

Audience Poll

• How many of you are IT pros?

• How many of you are Developers?

• How many of you are Power Users?

• How many of you are End Users?

• How many of you develop/manages/maintains the

workflows?

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#NJSPUG @pgbhoyar

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How to get Personal Office 365

Development Tenant?

Sign up for Office 365 Developer

Program at http://dev.office.com/

Get 1 year of Office 365 subscription

for free

Excellent for personal development

use

1 seat only

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How to get Office 365 Demo Tenants

Tenant?

Login at https://www.microsoftofficedemos.com/Loginusing your partner account

Get 3 months of Office 365 subscription for free

Excellent for rapid client demos

More than 20 Seats

Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) is also an option

Formerly called as MEC

1 Month Trial E3, E5

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans

#NJSPUG @pgbhoyar

#NJSPUG @pgbhoyar

Helps to Automate Business Processes

Helps to meet the Industry Standards

Helps Organizations to function Effectively

Important for success of SharePoint/Office 365

sites Implementations

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What are Workflows?

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Types of Workflows

Sequential State Machine

• Activities occur in sequence

• On rejection , begin from start

• Simple Business Processes example, Leave Request

• Activities are not sequential

• Can by pass activities based on business logic

• Complex business processes example, Financial Aid

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Typical SharePoint Workflow Life Cycle

Initiation

• When the workflow is started on list/library item

Running• User Interaction via tasks

• Status page reflects the status of the workflows

Termination • End of the workflow instance

Association

• When the workflow is associated with List/Library

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• Browser

• SharePoint 2013 Designer

• Visio 2013

• Visual Studio 2012/2013/2015

• Third Party Tools

Office 365 /SharePoint

Online 2013 Workflow

Tools

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Architecture of SharePoint 2013/2016 Workflows

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SP2013 workflows are fully declarative

SP2013 workflows are no longer compiled into .NET assemblies instead XAML files defines workflow and their execution No more custom code

Build WebServices for custom business logic

SP2013 workflows are available in Office 365/ SharePoint Online

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New SharePoint 2013 Workflows Architecture

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How does the workflow run in SP2013/2016?

Workflow

Instance

Starts

SP2010

Style

Workflow?

Use SP2010

Workflow Engine

Use New

Workflow

Manager

Workflow

Instance Executes

Workflow Instance Ends

Workflow

Instance Executes

YesNo

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How to identify SP2010 style and SP2013

style workflows?

List Settings -> Workflow Settings

Site Workflows -> Site Administration

->Workflow Settings

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Key Differences between SP2013 & SP2010 Style Workflows

SharePoint 2010 Style Workflows SharePoint 2013 Style Workflows

• Uses SharePoint 2010 Workflow Host

• Impersonation Step

• OOTB Visualization of Workflows

• No loops, stages in Designer WFs

• Custom task forms are InfoPath forms

• Can capture Approval comments OOTB

• Uses Workflow Manager

• App Step

• Need to create custom solution

• Looping, stages are present

• Custom task forms are .aspx pages

• Need to implement custom solution

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• The development/testing experience is

slow

Because of platform’s architecture

In general Workflow development is slow

process

Analogy : Public Transportation System

• Difficult to gather all the requirements

before start of the development

Be ready for multiple revisions

Lessons Learned

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Recent Announcements

• There will NOT be SharePoint Designer 2016 http://sharepoint-community.net/forum/topics/what-s-happening-to-sharepoint-designer-in-

sharepoint-2016-is-it

• Microsoft Flow https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-microsoft-flow-and-announcing-the-

public-preview-of-powerapps/

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What does this mean?

• SharePoint Workflows most probably will have same fate as InfoPath forms services

Microsoft will continue to support

No future enhancements

• Time to explore other options

Microsoft Flow Under Preview https://flow.microsoft.com

Visual Studio Workflows Can deploy them only as “App”

Other Third Party Products

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#NJSPUG @pgbhoyar

User Experience

Task Process Custom SharePoint Forms

• User Interaction via Tasks

• Not a good user experience

• Provides the ability to send reminders

• Lot of OOTB webparts/options are available to aggregate the tasks

• User Interaction via Custom Forms

• Can provide good user experience

• All the data is at the same place

• Need to implement the custom logic to send reminders

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows

• Naming Convention for Custom Workflows

Use the naming convention that works best for you and your

organization

For example, List or Library + ListName + Purpose

• Use activity “Add a comment” to write informative comments in

the workflow

End users will not see these comments unlike workflow history list

logs

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows

• Do not modify the OOTB global workflows

Create copy and then modify

• Log information in the History List

Log variables, important info that will be helpful during

debugging/troubleshooting

End users can see the logs

• Create custom task content types for tasks with only one

logical outcome

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows

• Use new Task List and History list for each workflow

To create the new tasks list and history list, we can use

Workflow Settings page

SharePoint Designer

SharePoint UI

OOTB “Workflow Tasks” List has additional notifications

To turn off -> List Settings – Advanced Settings -> Uncheck “Send e-mail

when ownership is assigned?”

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows

• Don’t create the variable if you don’t have to

50 is the limit

• Use SharePoint groups to assign the tasks/send emails instead of

individual users

• Keep workflow initiation activity to minimum

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows

• Capture the dates of various approval steps

Good for generating audit logs

• Save the Workflow status in a separate field

Avoid default workflow name

Helps if you divide workflows into multiple workflows

• Create a separate Workflow status field as text

Gives the ability of filtering and sorting

Approvers love this option

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows

• Pay extra attention while modifying the Custom Task content

types

Task outcome field must be the last field

• Review the workflow starting logic

Limit how many times the workflow gets started

Make sure they won’t start unnecessarily after the workflow is ended

successfully

• Restrict the access

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows?

• If possible Break down the workflows in multiple WFs

Helps a lot in development and maintenance

We can start SharePoint 2010 workflows from SharePoint 2013 only

We can not start SharePoint 2013 workflows from SharePoint 2013

workflows

You can use “Wait for field change in current item” to trigger the workflows

• For large lists, don’t remove the workflow, but set to no new

instance

Do it in non business hours

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows

• Have flow chart of the workflow handy Use Microsoft Visio

Pen and Paper works too

• Implement the logic to stop/start at a particular stage Super helpful in case the workflow instance gets terminated

Super helpful during migration (For on premise customers)

Helpful to update the business logic

• Using If condition and a custom variable, we can pick and choose the additional logging Similar to #if debug directive in C#

The workflow will be long, but it can save a lot of troubleshooting/development time

End users will not see additional comments in Production

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#NJSPUG @pgbhoyar

Throttling Limits in Office 365

• In Office 365 workflow manager has strict throttling limits for

SharePoint 2013 Style workflows

• The instance has exceeded the outbound http request quota for a

1.00:00:00 time period. The 5000 request limit was reached in <time>.

Analogy credit score

• Workflow instances can get suspended and we need to wait 24

hours to resume the suspended workflow instance by

clicking Resume for the workflow or

by using the SharePoint Workflow Client Object Model

• Suspended workflow instances will be terminated after 10 days.

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Throttling Limits in Office 365

• The resource limitations are for per workflow in a site collection

in the span of 24 hours

• There is no OOTB email alert if the workflow get suspended

• We can find the suspended workflows on the page

/_layouts/15/WorkflowServiceHealth.aspx

• If we develop workflow as an “App” these throttling limitations

does not apply

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Throttling Limits in Office 365

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Throttling Limits in Office 365 – Design Consideration

• Avoid infinite loops

We may use “Wait for field change in current item”

• Avoid using a workflow to execute complex algorithms

Workflows are intended to manage document-driven, human

processes and not to dispatch significant computational tasks.

• Avoid the use of the “Wait for Event in List Item" activity

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Limitations

We can not start workflows on delete event

50 variable limit

No source control for SPD workflows

String functions are limited

For advance implementations you will need to involve devs/architects

You can not start the workflows on Task lists whenever new tasks gets created by SP2013 style workflows

Workaround : Create SP2010 style workflow in Task List

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Questions? Feedback? Contact me:

Twitter: @PGBhoyar

Blog: http://pgbhoyar.com (limited contents)

Email: pgbhoyar@gmail.com

Feedback : Please provide feedback

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