The essence of a WorkFlow is the progression of steps (tasks, events, interactions) that comprise a work process, which involve two or more persons and creates or add value to the organisation’s activities. In a sequential workflow, each step is dependent on occurrence of the previous step; in a parallel workflow, two or more steps can occur concurrently.
As you can imagine, these can can get quite complicated rather quickly. Naturally, you are going to need help in depicting a sequence of operations, the work of a person or group, the work of an organisation of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.
Therefore, this category is full of handy tips, tricks, advise. Check out some of the Step by Step blogs or learn from our eBooks, how to videos and webinars.
In April 2011, Microsoft launched Office 365 – a comprehensive set of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions that allow any organization to obtain hosted, cloud-based access to Exchange, Lync, Office Web Applications – and SharePoint Online. All offer guaranteed uptime, fault tolerance, contractual service levels and clear, predictable pricing.
SharePoint 2010 is coming up to its 2 year birthday, so it worth talking about Ribbons. Too often solutions concentrate on pages, Web Parts, lists, libraries and workflows. A SharePoint solution should be more than this – each of these components should be combined to provide users with a holistic solution, where the components work together and not as discrete entities.
I guess you all already noticed that Microsoft and all other major players are moving towards cloud computing and offering various online services. SharePoint wasn’t skipped in that movement, so now Microsoft also offers SharePoint Online services as the part of the Microsoft Office 365 service.
The concept of workflows comes from the time when work was rather mechanical. People (and later machines) were supposed to repeat precisely defined steps in a fixed order (or sequence). Any deviation from prescribed path, any thinking and improvising was not welcome. Assembly lines or microprocessors – they were all realizing rigid sequences.
Nintex Workflow 2010 Version 2.3 was unveiled on January 10th. Nintex has improved the integration tools available in Nintex Workflow v2.3, making it even easier to leverage your in-house business data and systems. Nintex Live, www.nintex.com/live an online catalog of powerful cloud services you can use in your workflow designs, has also been added to Nintex Workflow v2.3. With its growing set of cloud-based actions, Nintex Live extends your workflows to Office 365 and allows you to integrate a wide selection of online services directly into your business processes.
I love that SharePoint Designer gives you the ability to create reusable workflows. It’s even better that you can select “All” as the content type. However, I have come across a minor issue with being able to update an item that requires check in and check out via workflow and being able to apply that to “any” list, content type, page or document. You can’t start a workflow on an item that’s checked out, but you can’t update an item that’s checked in. When you try to use the “Check out” action, you are expected to select a list to check out an item from.
Recently, we’ve been working with a customer on a particularly interesting use case for SharePoint that I thought others in the community might be interested in learning more about. The customer is using Zantaz (from Autonomy/HP) for email archiving with a primary focus around eDiscovery, email retention and legal hold. A number of factors are driving the review their current implementation, including its age and cost to maintain, and concerns about the recent flux in HP strategy
Over the last few weeks we’ve enriched the functionalities of UDOCX and the interface displayed on the screen of the multifunctional devices in order to provide additional features to the “Scan to SharePoint” operation.
SharePoint is a great tool and adding workflows to it makes it a marvelous one. Tasks automation and process streamlining mean less work and much efficient information flow. Unfortunately, like with any powerful tools, deploying workflows in a wrong manner can lead to results opposite than expected. There are many ways to achieve given functionality, but only one can be the optimal one. With so many switches and levers available for workflow designers, working on top of highly customizable platform like SharePoint, process implementation can become a disaster if performed without basic knowledge about workflow architecture and environment it works in. And usually it does not matter if you use SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio or third-party tool to define the workflow.
If you are responsible for designing and implementing workflows read on to learn about five most common things you can do to turn your workflow solution into a failure and, fortunately, advices how to avoid these traps.
It is strange how many developers wince when they face SharePoint and become melancholy when talking about workflows. Workflows are not just like programming, or something very special or something very complicated or something very limited or something for documents. Some people tried to solve simple tasks with SharePoint workflows, but failed somewhere when it became clear that they cannot read the manual from the middle and they have no time to read it from the very beginning.
