Download - SharePoint Workflow Best Practices

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Page 1: SharePoint Workflow Best Practices

SharePoint WorkflowBest Practices

Page 2: SharePoint Workflow Best Practices

About me

• Vadim Tabakman

• Lead Technical Evangelist, Nintex

• Over 20 years consulting, development and corporate IT experience

• End user advocate

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Introduction• There are more best practices and errors to avoid

• Based on real-world projects

• Advice applies to any workflow product

• No demos

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SharePoint Workflow and Multiple History Lists

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Why Not One Workflow History List?• History Lists are just SharePoint lists

• Performance degradation with 2000-4000 items

• Multiple Workflows and One History List

• Grows very quickly

• Multiple Workflows and Multiple History Lists

• Shares the load.

• Faster to access workflow history

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Don’t Always Use SharePoint Workflow

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Good Uses of SharePoint Workflow• Managing how people work

• Document approval & feedback

• Collaborative reviews & discussions

• Gathering signatures

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Good Uses of SharePoint Workflow• Automating some of SharePoint’s behavior

• Approve site creation requests

• Parse incoming email in a list and act on it

• Publishing items to target

• Moving documents through lifecycles

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Possible Uses of SharePoint Workflow• Manipulating other applications, data sources

• Employee onboarding

• Resource scheduling

• SharePoint lists become work queues

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Bad Uses of SharePoint Workflow• Transaction-oriented processes

• Blocking or modifying activity

• Application-to-application service activity

• Aggressive data transformations

• Work that doesn’t involve SharePoint at all

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Plan to Fail

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Consensus May Not Exist• Get 3 employees and 1 manager together

• Talk about a process

• Little agreement

• Documentation disagreement, too

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The Process Will Change

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Exceptions are Initially Ignored• Rarely is this considered in advance

• Rarely does everyone agree

• Ignored exceptions lead to bypass

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Initial Failure as a Winning Strategy• People do not want to hear these hard truths.

• You may have to create an initial workflow just to show how awful a

process is.

• Only then can you change it.

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Process

Step

Step

Step

Start Simple

Automatethisfirst

Automatetheselater

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Focus on Everyday Process

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Everyday Processes

• Steal time

• Get in the way

• Annoy users

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Everyday Processes

• Have few stakeholders (even if many participants)

• Are easier to automate

• Free up time to focus on more critical stuff

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Everyday Processes

• Automating them trains users how to think

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When to use a :List WorkflowSite Workflow

Reusable Workflow Template

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Reusability

• You should think about reusability first

• Save yourself time

• Save your colleagues time

• Save your business time and money

• Is a List workflow the best solution for you?

• It’s probably the quickest and easiest, but is it the best solution?

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What if I can’t do what I need to with the given

actions?

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Extensibility???

• Web Service calls – Call HTTP web service action

• 21 web services, just from SharePoint itself

• 3rd party LOB systems which have web services

• 3rd party SharePoint solutions that exposes web services

• Build Custom Web Service

• Build Custom Actions

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Put Forms in Their Proper Place

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The Form is the User Interface

• Not the workflow

• Not the data

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If (x and y) then do this do thatEnd if

If (user is Bob) then do this and that and the other thing undo thatEnd if

If (x and y) then do this do thatEnd if

If (x and y) then do this do thatEnd if

If (user is Bob) then do this and that and the other thing undo thatEnd if

If (x and y) then do this do thatEnd if

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Form-Only App Problems• Hidden logic

• Disconnected logic

• Security

• Complexity without code

• Inheritance / Knowledge Transfer

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Presentation Process IntegrationBegin Step 1

Step 2Step 3

End

Think About the Whole App

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Make the Workflow Do the Work• Documented

• Auditable

• Easier to change

• Easier to manage

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One Form Per Step• Submit

• Start

• Task

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Task Forms

• Workflow can route new data

• New data can be written to original form

• All info can be sent to other places

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Self-Reporting Workflows

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Least-Loved Techniques

• Browsing individual history entries

• Building custom reports

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You’re Already Using SharePoint

• The list itself can be the report

• Users can sort, group, filter on metadata (Leverage Views!)

• Write progress information to item properties

• Stage Workflows already do this

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Summary• Don’t always use SharePoint Workflow

• Plan to fail

• Focus on everyday processes

• It’s not about forms

• Self-reporting workflows

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Questions?