USING AND UNDERSTANDING
WORKFLOWS IN DOCUMENT
MANAGEMENT FOR END USERS
Welcome to SharePoint Saturday Denver!
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WHO AM I?
Kris Swanson
Twitter: @kris_swanson
Cell and Text: 720-331-4161
Email: kris.swanson@marquam.com
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/enus/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
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DELIVERING WORKFLOWS IN SHAREPOINT
Use out-of-the-box
capabilities with
configuration and
customization.
Empowerment and Agility
Rapidly build and deploy
business solutions
without having to write
code.
Build or buy tailored
solutions to address
strategic requirements.
Sophistication and Control
DOCUMENT APPROVAL WORKFLOW
Start
Send email to
notify approvers
Notify author of
approval
Approvers
review
document
Notify author or
rejection
Publish
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-workflowsHA102771433.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.
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INFORMATION WORKER SOLUTIONS
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/pr
ocurement/
(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.
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SHAREPOINT DESIGNER
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
X
X
X
X
Make changes while running
X
X
Error Handling
X
X
Promote from Dev-Test-Prod
X
X
Version History
X
X
X
X
X
X
Governance
Detailed Email
Allow workflow loop logic
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-theworkflows-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/enus/library/jj164026.aspx#bkm_WorkflowActions
• Nintex: http://www.nintex.com/enUS/Products/Pages/NintexWorkflow.aspx
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