Sharepoint Workflow – Business Process
MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 provide a multitude of features which help your business integrate and streamline your business processes. Some of these processes might include:
Collaboration on documents
Document Approval
Travel Requests
Expense Claims
New Employee Processes
Multi-stage Document Approval
These processes or workflows, as they are known in the Sharepoint Community, help organizations improve efficiency and productivity by managing the steps involved during the workflow process thus enables individuals to concentrate on work rather than process.
What are workflows?
Workflow is essentially the series of consective tasks which produces a result. This may involve the automatic processing of documentation through the effective use of business logic. Business logic may be defined as a set of instructions or rules that restricts and controls the actions that occur with a document or item.
Sharepoint uses the Microsoft Workflow Foundation Platform to enable your business process and business logic. Sharepoint essentially has two out-of-the-box types of workflow which make the business process management easier.
Sharepoint Workflow – Built-in
Sharepoint 2007 and Sharepoint 2010 provide a number of built-in workflow templates which may help you assimilate and automate archival, approval or review processes using online electronic forms provided by Microsoft Infopath Forms Server. These forms are quickly created and published online to allow employees to login to the web-based Sharepoint to collect and validate information.
Microsoft Infopath Forms
Microsoft Infopath 2007 allows you, as the business user, to create these online forms and publish them to Sharepoint. These forms can be browser-based, email enabled or can optionally be published to a network location. Some examples of browser enabled Infopath Forms are shown below:
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Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer Workflows
In the first case, Microsoft Sharepoint Designer is used to create simple workflows, such as a quick approval workflow. Microsoft Sharepoint Designer, now a free product from Microsoft, provides a set of workflow activities which when chained together form one workflow. Some of these actions include “Sending an email” or “Pausing for a duration”. An example of the Microsoft Sharepoint Designer Workflow interface can be seen here:
Sharepoint Custom Workflows
Custom workflows allow our skilled Microsoft Sharepoint Developers to refine the business process by adding your sophisticated integration into your existing legacy systems. Whether its Travel Requests updating your payroll system, or Annual Leave Requests notifying your Human Resources system, our developers and consultants will help you boost your employee productivity by streamlining your organisation’s everyday processes.
Conclusion
Workflow can be as simple or as complex as your organisation requires. Complex integrations and multi-step approval workflows or simple sequential workflow actions, it’s up to you. The built-in workflow engine together with Microsoft Infopath, which helps you as the business user build rich forms together with business rules, make Sharepoint an automatic choice for business process management.
