Thursday, June 11, 2009
SharePoint Travel System Workflow Solution: Two Alternatives
Laura Rogers hosts the EndUserSharePoint.com Workflow Solutions series of workshops. In last week’s workshop, she presented a solution to a Travel System Workflow created with SharePoint Designer. We invited Chris Geier from K2 to show how a third party tool would approach the same process.
Before I start getting into a flame war with people, no, we’re not pushing K2. Chris happens to be someone we trust based upon past experience. We’re not pushing the product and either is he… we are just trying to show alternatives and let you decide what is best.
Enough already. Let’s take a look at the solutions. Laura’s original solution is first. The second one is Chris’.
Thank you so much for the two presentations. Both are extremely clear!
As we are working on our SharePoint governance plan, we will be needing a SharePoint change management site with approval workflows. Could this be the presentation sequeal?
Thanks-
Charlie Epes
Bufrfalo, NY
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I am game. Laura, Mark? I have one of these built with Blackpearl following MOF guidance.
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Charlie, absolutely. One of the uses for products like K2 for SharePoint customers is related to IT governance in areas like SharePoint infrastructure lifecycle management. The tooling provides for rich “no code” ways of you both setting up governance processes (such as site provisioning and management ) and than executing , tracking and reporting on these processes.
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Jeepers, what an enthusiastic response! One of primary goals of our governance plan is to try to keep it as simple as possible AND to try to set certain thresholds so that the flexibity of SharePoint is maintained and not squashed… (example: changing views – no approval required. Permissions: approval required, etc.)
We started by setting categories of the types of changes, and then assigning approvers and doers.
thanks again-
Charlie Epes
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Great stuff. Laura’s solution is more familiar to me since we’ve done nothing but SPD for workflows.
Chris’s method is nice as well for those that have the means for K2. We don’t, so knowing a slick complex system like this can be achieved via stock SPD, that’s nice to know.
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Hi,
Why can’t you provide the flash video files for downloading? It helps most of the subscribers for updating their skills.
Thanks
Naren
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Thank you so much. I really appreciated Laura’s walk through SPD workflow creation.
I have a case where I built a relatively simple SPD workflow which watches a SharePoint custom list field value. When the item changes, and the item’s field is set to a specific value, an email is sent.
The problem is that the email isn’t being sent, even though the column is being set to the appropriate value.
What techniques are available for determining why a SharePoint designer workflow is not performing in the manner expected?
Thank you again for all your help.
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Can anyone please explain or provide a tut on dealing with the XML profiles and creating new profiles?
Thanks
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