SharePoint 2010 : Out of the Box Workflows

SharePoint 2010 comes with several workflow templates out of the box. These are generally installed as features, and are available for you to associate with lists or at the site level. In SharePoint 2007, you could only associate workflows with lists. Therefore, step one of having a workflow available for use is for it to be installed as a feature. Once it is available for use, you can then create "Associations" of the workflow with existing lists or sites. At this point, you can optionally ask the user associating the workflow some questions, usually presented as an "Association Form". An association form is what allows the workflow to interact with the user when the workflow is first associated with a list.

Once you have created an association of a workflow template, you can then choose to run the workflow on individual list items (or run it on the site if you had chosen to associate it). When you start a workflow, it can ask more questions by showing yet another form called as the initiation form. Thus, the "initiation form" is what allows the system to ask questions when a workflow is first initiated/instantiated.

As the workflow is running, it can ask further questions of the users. In asking those questions, the workflow can create tasks for users, and those tasks can then be performed by the end users. Those tasks go in a list, and can be represented as yet another kind of form, called as the "Task Form". Note that a workflow can have zero or one association forms, it can have zero or one initiation forms, but it can have many task forms.

Similar to task forms, the workflow can also be altered midcourse by end-users by using yet another kind of form called a "Modification form". Just like the task form, there can be zero or many modification forms on a workflow.

Let's pick an out of the box workflow and understand the usage of all these forms and the workflow lifecycle in general. The workflow I intend to use here is the "Approval" Workflow, which comes out of the box in paid versions of SharePoint.

In your SharePoint site, go ahead and create a new list based on the Custom List Template and name it "Items to be Approved". Then visit the list settings page of this list and view the versioning settings. Under versioning settings, choose to "require content approval for submitted items". By choosing this option, you just enabled the ability to have draft items available in the list. Draft items mean items that are currently a work in progress and should not be seen by everyone. They can be seen only by the author or by people who have the ability to view and approve draft items. This is controlled by the "manage lists" permission, which is one of the permission settings that you can give any particular SPPrincipal. An SPPrincipal can be an SPGroup or SPUser.

Next, back under lists settings visit the workflow settings link. Here you will find the various workflow associations you can create with this particular list. If you are using the enterprise version of SharePoint, the various workflow associations available to you are the following:

• Disposition approval

• Three state

• Collect signatures

• Approval

• Collect feedback

For this example, you will use the approval workflow. Therefore, select the approval workflow template and give it a name of "Approval". Then, click the next button. Clicking the next buttonbrings up the association form, which is an out of the box InfoPath form. If you have used thisworkflow in SharePoint 2007, you would note that this form has been redone. Fill out the form asshown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The Association form created in InfoPath

Notably, I have checked the check box for "Enable Content Approval". This means that the completion of this workflow will approve the associated list item that this workflow is running upon. Once you've filled out the form, click the save button. You will then be presented with a screen, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. The associated workflows with a list

This screen informs you of all the associated workflows with this particular list. If you have used workflows in SharePoint 2007, you would note a notable difference here. Even within a list, you now have the ability to configure to run a particular workflow with a particular content type.

Now add an item into the list and put "Test Item" in the Title. Note that SharePoint informs you that the items in this list require content approval, and that your items will not appear in public views, unless they are first approved by someone with proper rights. This can be seen in the Figure 3.

Figure 3. You are being informed that items on this list will require content approval.

Once you have created this item you would also note that the default view now contains a column called "Approval Status" and the approval status as of now is "Pending". Select the item and from the ribbon under the items click the workflows button. Alternatively, you can also choose to access the workflow screen from the ECB menu. Click the approval workflow association that you had created earlier to initiate the workflow. Initiating the workflow will present you with the initiation form. This form can be seen in Figure 4.

Figure 4. The initiation form for the workflow

Click the start button to start the workflow. By starting the workflow, the specified approver will be sent an e-mail message, and a task will be created for them requesting to come and approve the item. This task presents itself as yet another InfoPath form and can be accessed directly from either their e-mail or from the SharePoint site. In the SharePoint site, the task is created in a list called "Tasks". You specified this list name right before association form. There is another list you specified when creating this association, called "Workflow History". This is a hidden list and will store all the history activities of the running workflows.

Now visit the tasks list at http://sp2010/Lists/Tasks, and you will see a task created for the administrator. Clicking on this task brings up another form, which is the task form. This can be seen in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Task form for the workflow

At this point, clicking on the request change or reassigned task will bring up the necessary modification forms as well. For now, go ahead and click the approve button and then visit the "items to approve" list one more time. You would note that the item that the workflow was running upon has now been approved. This can be seen in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Approval Status and Workflow Status on the list item

Now, let me show you something really cool! Click the "Approved" link under the "Approval" column. This should take you to a page that informs you of the status of the current workflow. Assuming that you have office web applications installed in the current site collection you're working in, and you have activated the "SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features", and that Visio Services of configured on your web application, you should see a graphical view of the current workflow instance as shown in Figure 7^[].

^[] Note that in Figure 7, I took the screenshot on a machine with domain name "SP2010", your domain will be "Winsmarts" or whatever you choose.

Figure 7. Visio Visualization of your workflow

This is really amazing because it gives the user a friendly graphical view of the current workflow instance with the necessary values populated. On the same page, you would also see the historical tasks, and the workflow history associated with this instance of the workflow. This is information that most organizations would find extremely helpful.