Workflow in Sharepoint Designer

One of the most powerful features of SharePoint is its support for workflow. If you have never worked with workflow before, however, the concept can be bewildering.

Through Chapter 1 of SharePoint Designer Workflows you will learn about workflow in general and familiarize yourself with the terminology used in worfklow.

In Chapter 2, you will see how you can use SharePoint Designer to create workflow, and learn about some of the limitations and benefits of SharePoint Designer workflows.

Here is an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 2:

SharePoint Designer Workflows

Starring none other than… SharePoint Designer!
Now that we have a good understanding of what a workflow is, we can move on to explore how a workflow is implemented in SharePoint Designer (SPD).

Perhaps a good starting point is to explain what SPD workflows are not:

  • SPD workflows are not reusable. Once you have defined a workflow, you cannot move that workflow to another list or reuse the workflow somewhere else. Well, you can, but you need to do some configuring magic.
  • SPD workflows cannot do loops, at least not by default. By loops, I mean an iterative task performed repeatedly, such as modifying all items in a list or sending an email to remind people about a task every day.
  • SPD workflows have a limited set of activities. It is quite possible to utilize these activities to achieve impressive results, but you are still limited more in what you can do than you are in other workflow scenarios, such as Visual Studio workflows. For example, you cannot create state machine workflows without getting very creative.
  • Although you can create new activities to use in SharePoint Designer, this requires programming skills, and the upgradeability of these custom activities is not certain for the next version of SharePoint.

If none of this makes any sense to you now, I’ll explain more throughout this chapter, and you can then return here to see whether everything is a bit clearer then.

So, let’s take a look at what SPD workflows are all about.

You can read the entire SharePoint Designer workflow issue, including almost three hours of video tutorials and demonstrations for just $14.95.