SharePoint 2010 Workflow
Posted by: Clarity Blogs: ASP.NET,
on 21 Oct 2009 |
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One thing I wanted to get out of the SharePoint Conference 2009 is to see how much has been added to the built-in workflow and how it compares to capabilities of some of the external tools, K2 being the one I'm most familiar with. Whoops...the the K2 and Nintex sessions were scheduled at the same time as the SP workflow session...by accident?...a little friendly competition, maybe? (they did reschedule sessions)
So what is new with 2010:
- Visual display of running workflow progress
- Do not need to be tied to a tied to a list item
- Site workflows - not just tied to a content type or list
- Reusable declarative workflows can be designed
- Import workflows from SharePoint Designer to Visual Studio
- New actions (read/write to external lists, doc set and record mgmt, manager, user profile lookups)
- Solution packaging (.wsp)
- SharePoint Designer 2010
- Ability to edit out of the box workflows (Copy or Modify, Example: logic for whether approver is needed or not)
- data binding enhancements for including workflow data and specifying format
- sort of straightforward UI for If/Then/Else targeted as business users
- has the ribbon (it's everywhere now)
- Impersonation control (run as workflow author instead of workflow initiator for access to resources)
- Two-way import/export between Visio and SharePoint Designer
- Task process customization (what to do when a task is assigned, pending, expires, deleted, completes)
- Create custom declaritive activites in Visual Studio that you can then use in SharePoint Designer
So, while there are bunch of good improvements, there still seem to be limitations that keep the other workflow products and/or custom Visual Studio development:
- Create non-declarative workflows (non-sequential state machines, looping) - seems like a pretty big deal
- Custom forms or use of different forms at different points in the workflow (I think you have to use the same InfoPath form or list form throughout) - another big deal
- As far as I can tell workflows are till tied to a site so no easy way to see all my tasks across sites
- I'm still not sure what the versioning story is and need to get more understanding there
- No statistics across workflows or view of all the running instances of a particular type
- The SharePoint Designer is improved, but still kind of confusing - still need tech-savvy user in my opinion
- Visio designer was ok for light-weight framing, but didn't add a ton of value and it looks like once you import it, you don't get to work with it in the visual display which seems like an odd experience
In a future post, I want to start comparing in a grid the different workflow options (SP2007, SP2010, blackpoint, blackpearl, Nintex, others) and the features they have and really understand which tools are right for different scenarios.
