When you find the workflows that SharePoint provides
for you do not quite fit the process, Microsoft SharePoint Designer
2010 gives you the ability to modify them or even design your own from
scratch. This gives a business analyst or Power User the ability to
create his or her own workflows without requiring the involvement of IT
or even a developer. Using a predefined list of activities, the user
can whip up a workflow to route her documents for approval, move
documents, modify properties, and so on.
Note
SharePoint Designer started its life as Microsoft
FrontPage. While it was feared by many IT groups because of what damage
untrained users could do to SharePoint, it has since evolved into an
essential tool for managing SharePoint content by both IT personnel and
business users. SharePoint 2010 adds additional controls and settings
for IT administrators to have more granular control over who can use
SharePoint Designer, what actions they can perform, and on what sites.
SharePoint Designer connects directly to a
SharePoint site and allows the user to manage content in a very rich
user interface. The workflow tools within Designer allow the user to
develop a workflow specifically for a list, or a generic workflow that
can be used by many lists.
1. Introducing SharePoint Designer (for Workflow Development)
Before
we jump in to creating our first workflow in SharePoint Designer, let’s
take a look at the application to see what we are dealing with. Figure 1 shows SharePoint Designer 2010 opened at its home page for our site.
You can see from the home page that you can get a
quick overview of the site, including general information, permissions,
subsites, and other settings.
In the navigation pane on the left, you see a list
of all available objects such as lists and libraries, workflows, site
pages, and so on. As you can see, you can browse the majority of
objects within SharePoint related to design. With our focus being on
workflow, let’s open that tab to see what we have.
Figure 2
shows the Workflow tab selected. You will notice the options on the
ribbon are all related to our workflow tasks. The main pane lists all
our available workflows; because we have not created any custom
workflows yet, this list only displays the reusable workflow templates provided
with SharePoint Server 2010. The ribbon keeps us focused on the task at
hand by making only our workflow options available.
Clicking any of the workflows listed will open an
information page for that workflow template. This gives us a quick
overview of information about the workflow, start options, and even the
forms associated with the workflow (see Figure 3). This is very useful for troubleshooting.
Note
You may be wondering why the workflow Quarterly
Newsletter Review that we created earlier is not listed. Even though we
created a new workflow, we used an existing template (the
Approval—SharePoint 2010 template) to create that workflow. If you
navigate to the documents library through Designer, you will see it
listed in the workflows section for that list.
2. Workflow Types
When creating a workflow from Designer, there are
three options: List Workflows, Reusable Workflows, and Site Workflows.
The differences are explained in Table 1.
Table 1. Three Types of Workflows to Choose From
| Workflow Type | Description |
|---|
| List Workflow | Associated directly with a list. Cannot be reused on a different list. Content-sensitive so can work directly with list values. |
| Reusable Workflow | Not associated with any list. Can be associated with any list once created. Is not content-sensitive. |
| Site Workflow | Associated
with the site and not a list. Can be used for workflows that are not
associated with list data. Manually run from the site Actions menu. |
Note
Site workflows are new to SharePoint 2010. In SharePoint 2007, to achieve the same type of workflow you had to fake it by using a list with a single dummy item.
