Chapter 8. Workflow and Process Improvement

Workflow technologies facilitate human processes by attaching business logic to items and documents, while providing context and tracking progress. With the proliferation of digital information and the speed with which that information is propagated, having a way to track and manage the creation, approval, and publishing of information to the right place and at the right time is much easier with workflow technologies. Approvals can continue unimpeded even when the designated approver is out of the office by automatically routing the work item to a supervisor. If a response isn’t received within documented guidelines, reminders can automatically be sent out. Workflow technology has the ability to increase customer satisfaction by helping to keep responses within Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and provide an audited method of maintaining compliance.

The SharePoint technologies make it easy to build workflows out of the box with templates that provide support for a broad range of routing and tracking scenarios without IT involvement.

MOSS and WSS also empower organizations to build a broad range of sophisticated workflow-based solutions that utilize the functionality of the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) platform. The platform facilitates the integration of workflow into both the SharePoint and Office applications, and when combined with Visual Studio, developers can create an amazing variety of high-value workflow applications.

This chapter discusses the Microsoft Office workflow environment, tools, and platform and how it all comes together in SharePoint. This is very cool technology indeed!