Reviewing the Site Settings Tools for Workflows

A quick place for a site collection administrator to check on which workflows are enabled is from the Site Settings page, in the Site Administration section, and clicking the link for Workflows. Note that this link isn’t available for site owners, however. The site collection administrator can then see which workflows are available for use on the site. Figure 28.2 shows the Workflows page, where a number of workflows on a SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise site collection have been enabled.

Figure 28.2. Workflows page from Site Settings.

The Site Collection Features link should be accessed to make change to the workflows that will be available to the user community. A general best practice is to not enable the SharePoint 2007 workflows unless there is a specific need for them (for example, to support workflows that are migrated in various states of completion from a SharePoint 2007 environment, or to allow SharePoint 2007 workflow users to transition to the new SharePoint 2010 workflows gradually). Likewise, the Publishing Approval workflow should be enabled only in sites where Content Approval is going to be used in document libraries (this is turned on from Document Library Settings, Versioning Settings page). This workflow will then trigger when documents are saved as major versions in document libraries with Content Approval enabled, which can annoy end users if they don’t see specific value in it and are not trained in the process.

Next check the Workflow Settings link to see whether there are existing workflows associated with the site collection and remove any that aren’t desirable.