Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

THE BIG NEW FEATURES FOR SHAREPOINT DESIGNER

SharePoint Designer (SPD) has been the mainstay for SharePoint workflow creation. In SharePoint 2013 SPD has advanced its feature set for making workflow design easier, and in some cases, just more enjoyable to work with (as you will experience). Also, although you could stitch together workflows in SharePoint 2010 to do some very powerful things, a number of features, actions, and programming constructs were not available to give you the type of control over the “flow” in workflow that you really wanted and needed. SPD fills these gaps. Following is a list of some of the big new features you’ll experience in SPD 2013; these were highly requested features from Microsoft partners and customers alike:

• Visual Designer: For those who prefer a visual design surface with which to build their workflow, SharePoint Designer has a new Visual Designer. However, you must have Microsoft Visio Professional 2013 installed on your computer to use it.
• Stages: You no longer need to use just linear workflows that go from top to bottom as with SharePoint 2010. Human business processes are not strictly linear. Typically these processes have a number of tasks to be performed as a unit of work and processes generally include one or more units of work. When a unit of work is completed, sometimes there is a pause for a period of time before the next unit of work is triggered. Other times the business process needs to return to a previously completed unit of ...