harePoint Designer 2010 includes major improvements to
workflows. You can quickly design workflows that ease a wide range of
business and human processes. Many new building blocks also mean that
workflows are even more flexible, powerful and capable of modeling more
complex business logic and process.
Reusable Workflows
With
SharePoint Designer 2010, you can create workflows that are easily
reusable. You can create a reusable workflow in the top-level site in
the site collection, and that workflow is globally reusable; meaning
that the workflow can be associated with any list or library in the site
collection. You can also create a reusable workflow in any sub site in
the site collection; this workflow is available for reuse in that
particular sub site. This is a new type of workflow in SharePoint
Designer 2010.
Export Workflows
You can export a
reusable workflow from one site collection and then upload and activate
that workflow in a different site collection. SharePoint Designer 2010
supports exporting a workflow as a solution package or .wsp file. Later
in this book, we have explained how to export Designer 2010 workflows to
Visual Studio 2010.
Association Columns
If your
reusable workflow requires certain columns to be present in the list or
library that it is associated with, then you can add those columns as
association columns. Association columns get added automatically to a
list or library when a reusable workflow is associated with that list or
library. This is one of the great features.
Associate Workflows with Content Types
When
you create a reusable workflow, you can choose to filter your reusable
workflow to a specific content type. If you associate a workflow to a
site content type, you make that workflow available for all items of
that content type in every list and library where that content type is
used.
Site Workflows
A site workflow is associated
with a site. It is not associated with a list, library, or content
type. So unlike most workflows, a site workflow is not running on a
specific list item. In the browser, you can start a site workflow or
view the status of running site workflows by clicking Site Workflows on
the Site Actions menu.
Edit the Workflows Included with SharePoint Server
One
of the weaknesses of SharePoint Designer 2007 was that we were not able
to edit any of the out-of-the-box workflows. In SharePoint Designer
2010, this problem has been rectified. The three most popular workflows
in SharePoint Server: the Approval, Collect Feedback, and Collect
Signatures have been completely rebuilt as declarative workflows. That
means that they are now fully customizable. These workflows are
event-driven, and all of the important events in the workflow are
textured in the workflow editor, both for each task in the process and
for the process as a whole. For example, you can easily add conditions
and actions to define what happens when each task is assigned, expired,
or completed.
Design a Custom Approval Process
SharePoint
Designer 2010 includes three new approval actions: Assign Item for
Approval, Assign Item for Feedback, and General Task Process. The main
three workflows included in SharePoint Server 2010 out of the box are:
Approval, Collect Feedback, and Collect Signatures workflows. The
approval actions surface all of the important events in an approval
process, making it easy for you to design a new interactive workflow
process where many users can interact or collaborate on a specific
document.
Impersonation Steps
In the previous
version of SharePoint Designer, a workflow always impersonated the user
who started the workflow and ran with that user's permissions. That
means we can run a workflow with current user context only. In many
instances, we need to give unnecessary permissions to users who are
involved in the workflow process. In SharePoint Designer 2010, you can
use impersonation steps to have the workflow perform actions by
impersonating the workflow author instead of the workflow initiator.
Impersonation steps are very useful in approval and publishing
scenarios, where the people submitting content for approval and the
people approving content have different permissions.
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