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About me
• Vadim Tabakman
• Lead Technical Evangelist, Nintex
• Over 19 years consulting, development and corporate IT experience
• End user advocate
Introduction• There are more best practices and errors to avoid
• Based on real-world projects
• Advice applies to any workflow product
• No demos
Why Not One Workflow History List?• History Lists are just SharePoint lists
• Performance degradation with 2000-4000 items
• Multiple Workflows and One History List
• Grows very quickly
• Multiple Workflows and Multiple History Lists
• Shares the load.
• Faster to access workflow history
Good Uses of SharePoint Workflow• Managing how people work
• Document approval & feedback
• Collaborative reviews & discussions
• Gathering signatures
Good Uses of SharePoint Workflow• Automating some of SharePoint’s behavior
• Approve site creation requests
• Parse incoming email in a list and act on it
• Publishing items to target
• Moving documents through lifecycles
Possible Uses of SharePoint Workflow• Manipulating other applications, data sources
• Employee onboarding
• Resource scheduling
• SharePoint lists become work queues
Bad Uses of SharePoint Workflow• Transaction-oriented processes
• Blocking or modifying activity
• Application-to-application service activity
• Aggressive data transformations
• Work that doesn’t involve SharePoint at all
Consensus May Not Exist• Get 3 employees and 1 manager together
• Talk about a process
• Little agreement
• Documentation disagreement, too
Exceptions are Initially Ignored• Rarely is this considered in advance
• Rarely does everyone agree
• Ignored exceptions lead to bypass
Initial Failure as a Winning Strategy• People do not want to hear these hard truths.
• You may have to create an initial workflow just to show how awful a
process is.
• Only then can you change it.
Everyday Processes
• Have few stakeholders (even if many participants)
• Are easier to automate
• Free up time to focus on more critical stuff
Reusability
• You should think about reusability first
• Save yourself time
• Save your colleagues time
• Save your business time and money
• Is a List workflow the best solution for you?
• It’s probably the quickest and easiest, but is it the best solution?
If (x and y) then do this do thatEnd if
If (user is Bob) then do this and that and the other thing undo thatEnd if
If (x and y) then do this do thatEnd if
If (x and y) then do this do thatEnd if
If (user is Bob) then do this and that and the other thing undo thatEnd if
If (x and y) then do this do thatEnd if
Form-Only App Problems• Hidden logic
• Disconnected logic
• Security
• Complexity without code
• Inheritance / Knowledge Transfer
Task Forms
• Workflow can route new data
• New data can be written to original form
• All info can be sent to other places
You’re Already Using SharePoint
• The list itself can be the report
• Users can sort, group, filter on metadata (Leverage Views!)
• Write progress information to item properties
• Stage Workflows already do this
Summary• Don’t always use SharePoint Workflow
• Plan to fail
• Focus on everyday processes
• It’s not about forms
• Self-reporting workflows