Web Content Management with SharePoint MOSS 2007 (Part 2 - Workflow)

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Dec 12, 2007

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SharePoint MOSS WCM Workflow

It's rare that you see content on the Web that has not gone through some sort of review and refinements cycle — what most of us in the industry would call a workflow process.

This article is part two in a series on SharePoint (MOSS) 2007 Web Content Management. The first article provided a general overview of web content management in MOSS. In this installment we focus on one of the many flexible parts of SharePoint's core: the workflow engine.

A SharePoint Workflow Primer

Before we get into the how of implementing workflow in SharePoint, let's review some of the basics.

It's a Business Process
A workflow is a set of co-ordinated event-driven activities. Assigning workflow to a document, or a piece of content is the act of binding a business process to this entity. For example, you create a press release announcing your latest product release. Before that release can go out, it needs to be reviewed by marketing, by the manager of public relations and it needs to be translated into French and Spanish. According to what your content team has decided, all press releases must go through this business process to ensure the information is accurate and available to all interested parties.

For all content on your site — whether it's a document, text-based, or some other type of media — one must (should!) carefully consider what needs to be done to it before it can go live. These activities combine to create workflows.

Types of Workflow

SharePoint workflows are based on Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) which is a base set of technologies that programmers can access using Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer.

There are two types of workflow supported:

Sequential - this is similar to a flow chart style where there are decision points along the way that indicate what the next step is in the workflow based on some condition being met (or not met). These steps generally execute in a specific order - although there are exceptions.
State Machine - this style workflow is more complex and consists of a number of states, transitions between states and actions.

Workflow Architecture

The basic components of a workflow include:

an XML-based markup file that contain the basic information about the workflow and the activities contained within it
an XML-based rules file that contains the business logic of the workflow in declarative rules form
one or more aspx or Info Path forms

Unless you are using SharePoint Designer, workflows are compiled into assemblies and installed as features at the site collection level.

Workflow associations are stored in the database for sharepoint. For each type of content (document, list, or a content type), an association is made is made in the table. You can have more than one workflow associated with a content type, but they can't be the same type of workflow (i.e you can have an approval and a translation workflow, but not two approval workflows). In addition, workflows can be manually initiated or system initiated based on an event (i.e changing the content).

SharePoint Administration: Workflow Settings

There is an administration option for workflows that allows you to set some global settings at the Web Application level. These setting include whether user-defined workflows are enabled and how users who don't have site access are notified of their participation requirements in a workfkow (i.e they are assigned a task).