Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

12.6. Summary

This chapter covered the overall architecture and concepts of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), a new component added to the .NET Framework in the 3.0 release. Microsoft realized over time that more and more of their products, as well as applications built by developers, required some form of workflow. At the time, products and developers were creating their own implementation or relying on expensive third-party solutions. Ultimately, Microsoft elected to build a free workflow engine so that applications could host workflows, as well as a framework for building custom workflow programs.

The SharePoint team, flush with customer experiences and requests for a robust workflow story included out-of-the-box, elected to leverage the WF as the workflow engine for the latest release: WSS 3.0. Taking the WF one step further, SharePoint hosts the workflow runtime and provides all the necessary services. In addition, SharePoint adds a human element to the WF by associating workflows with list items and documents, adding tasks and a history log, and introducing the concept of workflow forms, which facilitate user interaction with running workflows.

This chapter demonstrated the process of creating a custom workflow using Visual Studio. The workflow, Dual Approvers, is useful when a new page in a Publishing site requires signoff by two people before being published.