Real World SharePoint® 2007: Indispensable Experiences from 16 MOSS and WSS MVPs

Chapter 8. Creating Workflows in WSS

by Robert Bogue

Wow! That's all you can say when you look at the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) — particularly when you evaluate the product's capability to facilitate, coordinate, and track business processes in your enterprise. Although the "SharePoint Vision" has always been about providing more connectivity with Office documents between people, between steps, and between systems, SharePoint has made significant progress in this regard with the latest release compared to previous releases, and when compared to competitive products.

This chapter covers a lot of ground as I help you to understand the options for creating workflows, the fundamentals of workflow, the limitations of workflow, and some ways to make workflow work for your organization.

Largely, this chapter won't be covering how to use Microsoft's Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), upon which SharePoint's workflow functionality is based. Some essential topics are covered only enough to place the SharePoint implementation of WF into perspective. If you need a comprehensive reference to WF, you'll want to pick up another book on workflow, such as Professional Windows Workflow Foundation by Todd Kitta (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2007).

What Is a Workflow?

A workflow is a set of reactions to a set of external stimuli. The first stimulus is "start," but there may be many more stimuli during the workflow that control ...