-Rgds,
N.T.GOPALAKRISHNAN

There are two ways to design processes for SharePoint starting from Visio Premium 2010. The first is to start with SP workflow shapes that are new in Visio Premium 2010 and export to Designer. When starting with the SP workflow shapes and exporting to SP Designer, you will be taking advantage of the native SP workflow. If you want to learn more about this approach, read Wictor Wilen’s EUSP article at: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/08/30/sharepoint-2010-and-visio-2010-better-together-part-1/.

The other method is to start with Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN — the industry standard for business process modeling) shapes new in Visio Premium 2010 and export via XPDL to a BPM suite of your choice. Over 60 BPM suites provide support for the XPDL import. When taking the BPMN + XPDL route, you are really bypassing Windows Workflow Foundation as the technology that manages workflow in SharePoint. This route will use the process engine of the BPM solution of your choice.

If you want to learn more about the differences between BPM and Workflow managed processes, see Ahmed Hafeez’s EUSP article from last week, Making Sense of SharePoint’s Workflow and BPM Capabilities. (http://tinyurl.com/27zdovu)

The Process Templates mentioned above provide an industry-standard starting point for designing and deploying managed business processes. As Mark mentions, any Visio user from 2003 and up has the ability to view and use the process models.

Global 360 is building a library of the BPMN processes in Visio and making them available for free. That said, because there are two paths – both with their own advantages — available for managing workflow and business processes in SharePoint, we invite others to contribute sample workflow models to this community using the Visio SharePoint workflow shapes.

If you have Visio Premium 2010 and couple it with the Global 360 analystView plug-in, you get to see the process model come to life in a simulation, and you get the XPDL import/export feature. Additionally, when exporting the model to Global 360’s Process360 for SharePoint solution, you are replacing SharePoint’s workflow engine, but SharePoint remains the content repository aligned to the process, and all of the user interfaces are built with SharePoint webparts. Therefore, you are not exiting SharePoint to orchestrate your process management efforts. .