I attended the Microsoft Collaboration tour event on Thursday afternoon and was able to confirm with some of the UK SharePoint team that it is fine for Beta 1 testers to start blogging about SharePoint 2007. So I thought I’d get on with it and put up a very simple post about setting up an approval workflow with SharePoint 2007. Workflow was very badly missing in SharePoint 2003, and although it could be achieved with third party addins or writing your own custom code, it was something that many thought should have been included by default. As we’ve known for ages the SharePoint team have decided to include it in the v3 product by default. Best of all for us developers is that it is built on top of Windows Workflow Foundation so no doubt there will be the ability to hook into it and customize the out of box operations that can be done. I’m not going to go into too much detail here about how it all works, 1 as things can change between betas, and 2 I want to get this posted quickly as it’s late at night ;-), so it’s mainly going to be a lot of screen shots and a few descriptive comments. Click on each image to get the bigger picture. Lets get started…
picture 1 above shows a standard document library that we are going to add a workflow to. To do this you need to go to the Document Library Settings. I’ve missed one picture out, but it’s just the lists of all the things you can do to Libraries with regards settings. The one we chose is workflow settings, and so we get the first workflow settings page…
From the first option you can see that we can create our own workflow templates. More about those in another post. All peoples tasks are to do with a workflow can be added to a task list, and a workflow history can be created. Finally there are the options for when to start a workflow, in our case we are going to do it when a new document gets added to the library.
The second workflow settings page needed to be split over two images….
There are quite a few settings on those two images but to be honest I think they explain themselves, or the text to the left does a pretty good job, so I’ll leave them. Questions in the comments! Next step…
Woot this screen just shows our workflow has been created and that there are no instances of the workflow in progress. To demo this I wanted the administrator to approve the document, so I have to create the document as a different user to who I am currently signed in as…
Above is a very simple screen shot but functionality I love so much! Easily being able to sign in as a different user! A quick digression, but now back to the workflow…
I’ve created my first document in Word 2007 and as it’s a new item the workflow has been started. You can see the status of the workflow in the column to the right. Lets log back in as administrator and check the task list…
Cool so you can see in the task list I have something created to do. An email was also sent to me but I’ve not got a screen shot of that. Not to difficult to imagine what it says though! Now lets open the document as the administrator who’s got an action to do on the document…
As you can see below the new Office 12 ribbon there is a notice to the user that there are outstanding workflow actions. Once you’ve read and checked the document you can click the ‘Edit this task’ button and see…
the actions you can take on the workflow. Add a comment and approve or reject it, or if you are feeling lazy you can reassign the task to some one else. Nothing like a good bit of delegation! Once you’ve approved the document you can save and close Word and head back to your task list…
You can now see that the task the administrator was assigned has been completed. Woot!
A final couple of screen shots to show you. From the fifth screen shot where the workflows are listed the is the option to remove a workflow. This is the screen you see when you click on that link…
As you can see it’s quite nice to be able to completely remove the workflow, or just stop any new instances of it being started.
Finally there’s the workflow history…
there’s a lot of information there so you can track the progress of a workflow.
Ok that’s it for now. A few simple screen shots as I said but hopefully something to wet the appetite for people who’ve not seen too much of SharePoint 2007 workflow so far. Remember that these are all beta 1 screen shots so many things could change between now and the release version.
If you have any questions, comments, or there’s something else in SharePoint 2007 you’d like to see a blog post about let me know.
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