Join Gini von Courter for an in-depth discussion in this video What's a workflow?, part of SharePoint Designer 2010: Building Custom Workflows.
A workflow is an organizational process, a work process that is either at the core of a business like an order entry process or that serves more of a supporting role like a process for Employee Onboarding, or a process to complete and route a purchase order. You can think of a workflow as a flowchart of actions that has a clear beginning, some sequential steps, and then an end. For example, this workflow is a small workflow designed to allow an employee to apply to be part of a management training program. First, the employee has an idea, they fill out a form, and then they submit that form to their immediate supervisor.
It could be they carry it over to their boss' desk or put it in an email, or that it's something that's completed totally electronically. After their supervisor decides whether they should accept or reject this request, they forward the form on to the HR department, and the HR department then sends a letter back to the employee, letting them know that they've either been accepted or rejected, and when the program will start if they've been accepted. It might be that there's another step as well. For example here, for some employees or for some specific management training programs, after the immediate supervisor approves this person, they then send this request on to management--move it up the chain, so to speak.
And after the manager approves, then it would be sent on to HR, and finally, the employee would receive notification. Workflows can also incorporate parallel branches. This one is a little more complex. Here we have an employee creating a presentation that will be used at the company's annual meeting. So, here they are working away creating the presentation. They send it to the marketing department where it goes through a buff up. It's all nice and clean now. But three different people need to sign off on it after the marketing department has worked with it. We have the Chief Financial Officer, the CEO, and the Chief Operations Officer, all of them need to sign off on it.
And they don't need to do it in any particular order, as a matter of fact, putting them in order might create a slowdown. For example, if the CEO is out of town, but the CFO could be looking at it, it makes more sense to allow the CFO to simply work with it. So, we have these steps in parallel, three signatures necessary, but they can happen in any order. Finally, after all of these folks have signed off on it, they will send it to the IT department, and the IT department will post it on the web page where it's available for the meeting.
Whether or not there is parallel branches in a workflow, the workflow still proceeds from the start through the series of steps to the final action here at the end. Regardless of the number of steps in your workflow or the type of workflow you have, all workflows have one thing in common. Every time you want to interact with users, you'll need to present them with a form to allow them to give you information or for you to provide information to them. So, the final way you can think of workflows is a workflow is an outline of a business process that contains forms for user interaction and logic to drive the steps in between.
We'll spend this course learning to develop workflows.
Author
Released
8/9/2012- Understanding workflows
- Documenting workflows with Excel, Visio, and the Office Drawing Tools
- Running the built-in workflows in SharePoint
- Understanding actions and conditions
- Working with if-then and if-then-else conditions
- Managing workflow messages with Outlook rules
- Pausing and stopping workflows with core actions
- Maintaining workflows with email aliases, workflow logs, and error traps
- Creating custom content types
- Creating a site workflow
- Exporting and publishing workflows
Skill Level Intermediate
Duration
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Welcome
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Welcome58s
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What you need to know5m 35s
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1. Understanding Workflows
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What's a workflow?2m 58s
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2. Documenting Workflows for Automation
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3. Running SharePoint Built-In Workflows
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Setting workflow options6m 1s
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4. Getting Started with SharePoint Designer
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5. Using Workflow Actions and Conditions
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Understanding workflow steps2m 19s
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Using parallel blocks3m 41s
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6. Creating a Simple Form for Your Workflow
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7. Using Email Notifications
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8. Using Core Actions in Workflows
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Pausing a workflow2m 30s
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Creating workflow variables2m 40s
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Using Do Calculation2m 20s
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Setting workflow status2m 6s
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Stopping a workflow2m 4s
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9. Using List and Utility Actions in Workflows
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Creating a new list item6m 51s
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Checking items in and out3m 47s
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Setting field values5m 44s
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Finding an interval6m 41s
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Updating list items3m 5s
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Extracting substrings7m 51s
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10. Getting Data from Users
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11. Creating Easy-to-Maintain Workflows
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Adding a comment2m 20s
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Writing to the workflow log3m 28s
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Checking workflow logs3m 37s
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Removing workflow instances4m 30s
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12. Creating Reusable Workflows
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Creating a reusable workflow3m 29s
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Creating a site workflow7m 37s
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13. Using Visio Premium 2010 for Visual Workflow Design
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Conclusion
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What's next?2m 39s
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Video: What's a workflow?