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Using and Understanding Workflows in Document Management for End Users. Welcome to SharePoint Saturday Denver! #SPSDEN. Who Am I?. Kris Swanson Twitter: @ kris_swanson Cell and Text: 720-331-4161 Email: kris.swanson@marquam.com Linked In: Kris Swanson. Intended Audience.
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Using and Understanding Workflows in Document Management for End Users Welcome to SharePoint Saturday Denver! #SPSDEN
Who Am I? Kris Swanson Twitter: @kris_swanson Cell and Text: 720-331-4161 Email: kris.swanson@marquam.com Linked In: Kris Swanson
Intended Audience Information Workers p.s. If you like Visual Studio you’ll probably be bored.
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.
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
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?
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)
Delivering Workflows in SharePoint • Power User • SOLUTIONS • IT Managed SOLUTIONS • Information Worker SOLUTIONS • Use out-of-the-box capabilities with configuration and customization. • Rapidly build and deploy business solutions without having to write code. • Build or buy tailored solutions to address strategic requirements. Empowerment and Agility Sophistication and Control
Information Worker Solutions What options? • Alerts • Content Approval Settings
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 • 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)
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).
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
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
Custom • Developers love this
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