Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog : Workflow

Microsoft IT Showcase whitepaper on Microsoft's internal migration from MCMS 2002 to MOSS 2007

LLiu — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 05:32:00 GMT

[Reposting from the SharePoint Team Blog.]

Summary

Migrating from Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) 2002 to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 has enabled the Microsoft Information Technology group to improve its self-help support portal, called ITWeb. The ITWeb site now provides more personalized content to users, improved search features, improved content creation, and streamlined workflow. The new solution also requires less support effort.

Overview

Situation

Microsoft needed to improve the user experience with its internal IT self-help portal. The existing solution made the process of creating, maintaining, and locating content too difficult.

Solution

Microsoft migrated the content from the existing the self-help portal in Content Management Server 2002 to SharePoint Server 2007.

Benefits

Migrating the solution to SharePoint Server 2007 improved the user experience by providing better:

· Content authoring and management.

· Navigation and search.

· Integration and customization.

· Uptime and response time.

Products & Technologies

· Content Management Server 2002

· Office SharePoint Server 2007

· The 2007 Microsoft Office system

Full Story

Here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/msit/deploy/itwebtcs.mspx

ECM Starter Kit for B2TR

ecmblog — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 01:54:00 GMT

Hi all!

The ECM Starter Kit updated for B2TR is in the process of being published to MSDN. But in the meantime, just thought I'd post an "unofficial" version.

The samples are pretty much the same as in the Beta 2 kit, but there are a few additions:

Whitepaper: How to Add Activities to SharePoint Designer
Records Management Sample: Sample Barcode Generator
ECM Workflow Activity: FindManager activity

Also, the workflow templates come with some WSP solution package files to help with bundling workflows for deployment on production servers.

Hope this helps:)!

Eilene Hao
Program Manager - Office/SharePoint Workflow

Understanding Workflow in Windows SharePoint Services V3 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system

ecmblog — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:55:00 GMT

[Reposted from the SharePoint Team Blog]

We’ve received numerous inquiries via this blog and elsewhere for information on “how workflow actually works in SharePoint 2007.” So, I’m very pleased that my colleague, Paul Andrew, who’s a Product Manager for Windows Workflow Foundation, just announced the availability of the Understanding Workflow in Windows SharePoint Services V3 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system whitepaper, which provides details on how workflow works in Windows SharePoint Services V3 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 as well as a comparison guide for choosing between the two.

You can download the whitepaper (5MB Word format) directly from here.

Walkthrough: Using the SharePoint Server 2007 Approval Workflow

ecmblog — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 01:51:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

As promised in my intro to workflow post on the SharePoint blog, I'd like to walk you through one of the workflows that come with SharePoint Server 2007 to give you a feel for the SharePoint workflow user experience and some basic concepts and terminology. Today I’ll flesh out the same scenario I described in my intro: getting approval on a document.

Let’s say that I’ve written an article that I’m going to post as a blog entry;). Before I post it, I need to get it approved by my content managers. Rather than send an email and wait for responses, let’s start an Approval workflow on the document:).

Starting the workflow

I can start a workflow by opening the context menu on my document in the SharePoint list, and selecting the Workflows option. But with SharePoint Server 2007, I can also start the workflow directly in my Office 2007 client applications by going to File->Start Workflows. Client integration such as this is a key advantage of workflow in SharePoint Server 2007 vs. core Windows SharePoint Services.

Next, I get a list of workflows that are available for this document (The available workflows are set by the list or site administrators in a process called workflow association, or adding a workflow to a library or list.).

When I click on the “Approval” workflow, I’m presented with a workflow initiation form, which lets me set information that workflow needs to start, such as the people who should approve the document, a due date, and some instructions or comments. An interesting thing to note here is that the form that appears if I start from the browser or client is exactly the same; we’re using one InfoPath form, and we get a rich-reach symmetric experienceJ.

I enter the names of the approvers: John, Mary, and Bob. I fill out the other fields and I click on the start button, and I get an email that the workflow has begun.

Interacting with the Workflow via Tasks

Approval workflows assign tasks in serial by default, so the workflow assigns a task to John to approve this document. This task is a list item in a “Tasks” list in SharePoint, where our team manages our tasks.

John gets an email notification that he has an approval task for my article. From the task, he opens the document. In Word, a business bar appears telling him he has a workflow task assigned to him for this document with a button that says “Edit this task”. John clicks on the button and up pops an InfoPath form with some controls and buttons to Approve or Reject. Again, with InfoPath forms, this is a symmetric experience when you edit your task in the browser or client.:) John likes the article, so he hits the approve button.

The workflow then assigns a task to Mary, who is going out of town and won’t have time to read it. So she clicks on the “Reassign task” link in her task form and enters Susie to take over for her. The task gets reassigned to Susie, who approves. The workflow assigns a task to Bob.

In the meantime, I’m curious to see what people have said, so I open the workflow status page and see John’s comments and approval, see that Mary’s task has been assigned to Susie who has approved, and that Bob has an open task. Phew, one to go:P.

But Bob reads it and doesn’t like one of the sections. D’oh! Luckily for me, there’s a “Request a change” option on his form; he clicks on this and enters his comments. A task gets assigned to me, I fix the doc and complete my task. Bob gets a new approval task, and this time he approves. Finally, I get an email telling me that the workflow has completed, and I publish my entry to the blog.

So that’s a quick walkthrough of using workflow. There are also lots of options you can set for these workflows when you associate them with a list, such as default approvers or stopping when someone rejects. You can also modify the workflow in-flight by adding approvers or updating task descriptions and due dates, so I’d encourage you to play around with it if you get the chance and see what interesting things you can do.

Next time I’ll cover how to associate a workflow with a library and modify a running workflowJ Stay tuned!

-Eilene

The ECM Starter Kit

ecmblog — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:07:00 GMT

Hi, everyone!

As a follow-up to my “Introduction to SharePoint Workflow” post on the SharePoint Team Blog, I’m very excited to introduce to you the Enterprise Content Management Starter Kit, a new resource we published on MSDN last week for developers looking to extend ECM features in Office SharePoint Server 2007. It contains over a dozen code sample projects that include document transformers, new records management features, and custom workflows. It also contains whitepapers and templates for workflow.

The kit is meant to be a supplement to the SharePoint Server SDK. Customers often ask us, “How do I implement X? Do you have an example of how to do Y?” So we put together these samples to implement the things that we get asked about the most. We hope it will be helpful to you in illustrating concepts and providing starting points for customization!

The kit is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=38ca6b32-44be-4489-8526-f09c57cd13a5&displaylang=en.

Please let us know if you have suggestions on what we should include in our next package/kit! We'd love to know what you’d like to see J.

Thanks!

Eilene