Beginning SharePoint 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007 (Programmer to Programmer)

In this chapter, you saw how you can support and sometimes automate various business processes using SharePoint 2007’s workflow capabilities. You can define workflow as the various tasks, and the order in which those tasks occur, related to a business activity that your team must complete. Although most SharePoint workflows are generally based around specific documents or list items, they can represent much larger human-based processes and actions. After reading this chapter, you should know the following:

• When defining a workflow process, you can select users or groups for specific activities. By doing so, tasks are created for these users.

• Workflow processes can be either serial or parallel. A serial workflow is one that only allows users to participate one at a time, whereas a parallel workflow may involve multiple participants at a given stage in an undefined order.

• SharePoint provides a number of templates that you can configure to suit your company’s process and that you can associate with various content elements such as lists and libraries. These workflow processes include common activities related to content approval, feedback, or collecting signatures.

• You can also create custom templates using the Windows Workflow Foundation, Visual Studio 2005, or SharePoint Designer, if you are familiar with these programs. You can only assign workflows you create using SharePoint Designer to a single list or library; other central components, such as content types, which are discussed in the next chapter, cannot leverage them.

• The translation management template assigns and delegates tasks related to translating documents, and you associate this template with a document library. This workflow has a special list called Translators that stores information the system requires to identify for which languages documents should be created and to whom the workflow should assign translation tasks. When you upload a document to a translation management library, you specify a language. When the workflow launches, it copies the source document and creates new versions as placeholders for the translated versions.

This chapter demonstrated just a small amount of what is possible using workflow in SharePoint 2007 by looking at the usage scenarios of a small advertising team. It is recommended that you take some time to familiarize yourself with the various templates and customization alternatives so that you can effectively support your organization’s business process management needs.