By Riccardo Emanuele, Consulting Director
One of the great new features of SharePoint 2010 is the ability to open up the workflow design experience to business users. Many users are familiar with using Microsoft Visio these days and it has become almost a standard for defining business requirements graphically. Over the past couple of years we have noticed that more and more of our clients are using Microsoft Visio to mock-up their process flows in the form of flow charts, or even putting together more complex swim lane diagrams.
Now, with the release of Office and SharePoint 2010, it is now to take output from Visio and use it to generate workflows within SharePoint.
Visio now comes with a new template under the Flowchart category called Microsoft SharePoint Workflow. This can be used to model business processes using conditions and actions that are SharePoint Specific.
Quick Overview
In this image you can see the most common items that can be used to create a process map; these are included on the Quick Shapes navigation pane.
By clicking on any of the other three panes you can access a whole lot more actions and conditions.Any workflow process must start with a Start action and each point where the workflow process may terminate requires an End action. In between these points, we are free to configure any number of conditions and actions to map out a real business process.
Common actions include starting a new out of the box SharePoint Approval workflow, sending an email or assigning a to-do item to a specific user (or group). Quite complex scenarios can be designed using these items.
So the goal for the user is to define the process flow and make reference to every condition and action that may occur as the process is executed. The following image is a very simple representation of a workflow process modeled in this way.
The important thing for the user to do is label each of the actions and conditions correctly and ensure that any conditions have labelled Yes and No paths assigned to them. Once the workflow is complete, it can be exported in a Visio Workflow Interchange format and sent to a more technical user who has access to the SharePoint Designer application. They can then import the exported map into SharePoint Designer where it is translated into a SharePoint workflow. They can then modify it and prime it for use, ensuring that it functions correctly and is associated with the correct document libraries, lists or sites. The workflow can then be published to a test SharePoint environment for verification.
All in all, this is a great new feature and will make it a lot easier for power users and subject matter experts to get involved in SharePoint projects and will speed up the overall design to publish process. The important thing is that it puts the power of definition back into the hands of those who understand their business and who should be able to model it more accurately. Granted, there is an element of IT involvement required, and this should always be the case to ensure that standards are maintained and processes are optimised for performance. As with anything, governance is critical and should always be a central part of any workflow project.
The only thing to bear in mind is that you do need Visio Premium and you will also need to download SharePoint Designer. As a rule, we would recommend that SharePoint Designer workflows are only used for specific departmental or project level solutions, and that enterprise workflows are modeled with a more robust, measurable and scalable toolkit.
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