Chapter 1
Introduction to SharePoint 2010 Workflow
SharePoint 2010 is an exciting technology platform that continues to deliver the promise that Microsoft made with its earliest commercial version, SharePoint Team Services (STS) in 2001. A lot of people in the industry are excited by the product’s new technical features (including the authors!) but the real power of the product shouldn’t be reduced down to a spreadsheet showing new or upgraded features. Instead, SharePoint 2010, like its predecessors, provides a powerful platform on which skilled technologists can deliver business value and solutions to your customers, your fellow employees, your trading partners, and indeed, almost anyone you can imagine. This book can help you become one of those skilled technologists.
SharePoint has always been like this. STS made this promise in 2001 by focusing on providing basic document sharing and collaboration features primarily for departments. WSS 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 expanded this to be enterprise-capable; although, it still had a long way to go. WSS 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) extended this even further and represented a leap forward in scalability, functionality, technical extensibility, and overall suitability for solving business problems.
And now you have SharePoint 2010, which delivers even more on the promise, and in many respects, for the first time, the product is truly accessible to the large number of nontechnical users — power users, ...
