May 27, 2016 Building Workflows with SharePoint Designer the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Lenn Higa Senior Solutions Consultant MCTS SharePoint Configuration

Company Overview

Our Customers Include

SharePoint Designer (SPD) What is it? Who uses it? What are the benefits of it?

SharePoint Designer 2013 Workflows Create custom workflows Ability to package workflows in SPD 2013 SharePoint Workflow Platform Types SharePoint 2010 Workflow SharePoint 2013 Workflow Why the SharePoint 2010 Workflow platform?

What’s New in SharePoint 2013 Workflow Looping Loop a number of times, or based on a condition Visual Designer Visio designer integrated into SharePoint Designer (if Visio installed) Stages To group a set of actions together; allows jumping around within the workflow Conditionally jump to another stage Ability to call web services without writing code Better scalability with the rebuilt workflow engine Supports cut/copy/paste/undo/redo on workflow actions

New Workflow Actions in SharePoint 2013 Assign a Task Go to a Stage Call HTTP Web Service Start a list workflow Start a site workflow Trim String Find Substring in String Replace Substring in String And more…

Types of Workflows List workflow Reusable workflow Site workflow

List workflow Associated to a single list All columns of that list is available to the workflow Workflow is started based on an event (i.e. item created, item changed) In SharePoint 2013, it can now be saved as a template

Demonstration List Workflow New features in SPD 2013 Workflow Visual Designer Stages and more…

Reusable workflow Not bound to a particular list or library, but can be associated with and run on any list or library All base columns are available for use within the workflow A reusable workflow can also be bound to a particular content type, where it will be available to any list/library that the content type is included in All columns of that content type are available for use within the workflow

Demonstration Reusable Workflow Associating a reusable workflow to a list Multiple ways to create a reusable workflow Differences between these methods

Site workflow Not bound to a particular SharePoint list or library, but can be associated with and run on a particular SharePoint site Workflow is started manually However, there are some alternatives to automate/schedule a site workflow

Packaging workflows SharePoint 2013 allows saving “list” workflows as templates, in addition to the reusable and site workflows Save as template Creates a solution (.wsp) in the Site Assets library of that particular site This.wsp file can be uploaded as a sandboxed solution and activated A site feature for this workflow must be activated at each site where it is to be used, where it will add the workflow to the site Dependencies All dependencies such as lists, libraries, columns, and content types must already exist on the new site Each dependency must have the exact name as the source dependency

Demonstration Packaging Workflows Save workflow as template Upload/Activate and make it available in another site

Final Thoughts

Summary Why should I use SPD 2013 to build my workflows? SPD is a FREE tool SPD 2013 Workflow is much IMPROVED Create your own workflows, with your own logic Now comes with an integrated Visual Designer Why not SPD? Complex workflows, which require more than what’s available in SPD Not everything fits into the SPD workflow model

Questions?

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