Hi and welcome to part 2 of a series that aims to showcase the good and the bad of SharePoint 2013 workflows, using a simple use-case. In part 1 I introduced you to the mythical multinational called Megacorp and its document control requirements. Also in part 1, we created a site with the necessary lists and libraries from which we can build the workflow. To recap, we used the Document Center site template, and then modified the built-in document library (Documents) to store the organisation that each document belongs to. We created a custom list called Process Owners that stored who is accountable for controlled documents in each organisation. Below is an XMind map to show you the Information Architecture of the Megacorp document control site.

Our workflow is going to:

• Look at a document and determine the organisation that a document belongs to
• Look in the process owners list for that organisation and then determine the process owner for the organisation by grabbing the information in the “Assigned To” field
• Create an approval task for the process owner to approve the release of a controlled document.

Now this all sounds straightforward enough in theory, but this is SharePoint we are talking about. Let’s see how reality stacks up against theory. I will give lots of screenshots for readers who have never tried using SharePoint Designer Workflow before…

Creating the workflow

Step 1:

Right, so the workflow will fire when a document is modified, so we will start by adding a list workflow and link it to the Documents library. So using SharePoint Designer 2013, we open the Megacorp site and in the ribbon, we click the List Workflow button. This will cause a dropdown menu to appear below the icon, showing the lists and libraries on the Megacorp site. From this list, we choose the Documents library.

   

Step 2:

We are presented with the workflow creation screen. Call the workflow “Process Owner Approval” and click OK.

Note: If, at this point, you get an error, it means that Workflow manager has not been provisioned properly. Remember that in SharePoint 2013, workflow is a separate product and needs to be installed. This is a change from previous versions of SharePoint where workflow was always there, as it was part of SharePoint.

Assuming SharePoint is configured right, SharePoint Designer will have a think for a while and eventually display the following workflow creation screen, ready for us to do cool things!

The next step is to add a workflow action. The most logical workflow action for us to try is one of the task actions. We will attempt to assign a task to the process owner for a document.

Step 3:

From the workflow ribbon, click the Action icon and choose “Assign a task”. The action will be added to the workflow, ready for you to fill in. For those of you reading this who have never done this before, the process is reminiscent of configuring email rules in outlook in that the action is added and you then fill in the blanks..

  

Now let’s configure the finer details of the Assign action above. A task needs to be assigned to a user, and we need to set up the logic for the workflow to work out who that user is. If you recall, the Documents library has a column called Organisation that specifies which Megacorp entity owns each document. A separate list called Process Owners then stores whoever is assigned as the process owner for each organisation (using the Assigned To column). So when the workflow runs on a particular document, we have to take Organisation specified for that document and use it to search the Process Owners list for the matching Organisation. Once we find it, we grab the value of the Assigned to user and create a task for them.

Here is a dodgy diagram that explains the logic I just described.

So let’s give it a go…

Step 4:

Go back to your newly minted “assign task” that you just added. Click the “this user” hyperlink on the newly created task. The task properties screen will appear as shown below. In the Participant textbox, click the ellipses button to bring up the Select User dialog box.

 

In the Select User dialog box, choose Workflow Lookup for a User and click the Add >> button. This will bring up the ambiguously named Lookup for string dialog box that allows us to choose where to look for our process owner. In the Data source drop down, we choose Process Owners from the list.

Next we have to tell the workflow which column holds the details of the person to perform the task. In the Field from source drop down, choose the Assigned to column as we talked about above.

At this point, the workflow knows which list and column holds the information it needs as per the image below:

,

But currently we do not know the specific user we need. Is it John Smith, Jane Doe or Jack Jones? Fear not though – this is what the Find the list item section of the Lookup for string dialog box is for. This is where we will tell the workflow to find only the person who matches the value of the Organisation column assigned to the document.

Step 5:

First up, we tell the workflow which field in Process Owners will be used to compare. This is the Organisation column, so in the Field: drop down, choose Organisation. Next we have to match that organisation column with the one in the Documents library. Click the Fx button next to column textbox called Value. A new dialogue box will appear called Lookup for Extended Field. Leave the Data source dropdown as Current item and in the Field from source dropdown, choose the Organisation column.

  

Note 1: in a workflow, “Current item” refers to the item that the workflow has been invoked from. If you recall at the start of this post, we created a list workflow and associated with the Documents library. Current item refers therefore to any document in the Documents library that has had a workflow invoked. All of the metadata associated with the current document is available to the workflow to use.

Note 2: Keen eyed readers may be wondering what the deal is with the column labelled Organsiation_0. Don’t worry – I’ll get to that later.

Now that you have selected the organisation column from the Documents library, we have filled in all of the logic we need to grab the right Assigned to user. Clicking ok, the workflow designer will warn you that if you have been silly enough to add multiple process owners for a given organisation, that it will use the first one it finds.

 

Finally, we are back at the task designer screen. A lot of screenshots just to wire up the logic for finding the right process owner eh? We haven’t even configured the behaviour of the task itself yet!

In fact, for now we are not going to wire up the rest of the task. I would like to know if the logic we have just wired up will work. If I can confirm that, I will come back and finish off creating the task with the behaviours I want.  So instead, let’s click Ok to go back to the workflow designer. Now we can see our Assign a task action, ready to go.

Now before we can test and publish the workflow, we need to tell it to end. Now this is a little counter intuitive to someone who is used to SharePoint 2010 workflows, but it makes sense once you understand the concept of a workflow stage.

SharePoint Workflow 2013 Stages – an interlude…

If you have ever sat around and tried to map out a business process, you have probably experienced the fun (not) of discovering that even a relatively simple business process has a lot of variations to it – some quite ad-hoc or dynamic. Trying to account for all of these variations in workflow design can make for some very complex and scary diagrams with even scarier implementations. As an example, take a look at the diagram below – this is a real process and apparently it is only page 12 of a 136!

Now in SharePoint 2010, implementing these sorts of workflows was pretty brutal, but in 2013 it has been rethought. A stage is a construct that allows you to group a number of workflow actions together, as well as defining conditions that govern how those actions happen. Each stage in a workflow can transition to any other workflow stage based on conditions. This means that a workflow can effectively loop around different stages and greatly simplify implementing business logic compared to SharePoint 2010.

The means by which this is done is via the the new Transition to Stage workflow action. The way this works is at the end of each workflow stage, there is a transition to stage section as shown below:

Step 6:

When you click into the Transition to stage section of the workflow, there is only one workflow action available: the Go To A Stage action. Adding this to the workflow will present a dropdown that will allow you to transfer the workflow to any the you have defined, or to end the workflow. Right now we will end the workflow, but we will be revisiting this stage idea later in the series.

   

All right! We are done. The final step is to save and publish the workflow.

Step 7:

In the ribbon, look for the Publish icon and click it. Assuming everything goes according to plan, you will be back at the workflow overview screen in SharePoint Designer.

 

Congratulations – you have published your workflow. “Well that was easy,” I hear you say… But we haven’t tested it yet! In the next post we will test our masterpiece and see what happens. You might already have an inkling that the result may not be what you expect… but let’s save that for the next post.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

 

Hi all

Workflows are big business in SharePoint land, despite the capability of SharePoint Designer Workflows being a fairly weak link in the overall SharePoint value proposition. If this wasn’t the case, then products like Nintex or K2 would not be so popular and workflow vendors wouldn’t have the biggest booths at the average SharePoint conference.

One of the serious strategic advantages of going with the SharePoint stack is the amazing 3rd party ecosystem that flourishes around the base product. No other platform in the space has the level of 3rd party support that SharePoint enjoys. But while its nice to be able to have great options for serious SharePoint workflow development, with each successive version of SharePoint that comes out, there is always that hope that one can use the base functionality without having to jump straight away to the 3rd party tools.  After all, it is quite common for organisations, having just gone to the time and expense of adopting SharePoint, to be dismayed that they have to part with yet more cash for 3rd party tools to address large functional gaps that were not apparent in the contrived product demos.

Another important trend being hidden by cloud hubris is the rise of the citizen developer. The CIO’s fountain of knowledge known as Gartner, stated that by 2014 25% of new business applications will be delivered by Citizen Developers.  They defined citizen developers as “a user operating outside of the scope of enterprise IT and its governance who creates new business applications for consumption by others either from scratch or by composition.” Elaborating, Gartner stated that

“Future citizen-developed applications will leverage IT investments below the surface, allowing IT to focus on deeper architectural concerns, while end users focus on wiring together services into business processes and workflows. Furthermore, citizen development introduces the opportunity for end users to address projects that IT has never had time to get to — a vast expanse of departmental and situational projects that have lain beneath the surface.”

So with SharePoint 2013, Microsoft has indeed changed things up a notch in the workflow world. Is it enough to enable and empower citizen developers?

That is what this series aims to find out… First up, lets take a quick look at the forces we are going to be meddling with…

What’s new with SharePoint 2013 and workflow…

Workflow in SharePoint 2013 is significantly different from SharePoint 2010. It fact, it is essentially a completely separate product called Workflow Manager. Technically, Workflow Manager is not part of SharePoint at all – there is no “workflow” service application or “service on a server” to be found. Instead, it is a separate process that works by communicating with SharePoint over the HTTP protocol in various ways.

This means that we have the option of deploying Workflow Manager onto its own server, or set of servers (although for you smaller sites, it happily installs onto your SharePoint servers and coexists with the rest of SharePoint too). This loosely coupled model has scalability benefits as workflow load can now be separated from the rest of SharePoint. It also means badly behaved workflows are less likely to affect SharePoint sites because they run in a separate process or separate servers. 3rd party applications (think about solutions built using the SharePoint 2013 apps model here) can also interact and communicate with workflow manager separately to SharePoint. It also helps Microsoft to realise their strategy of “encouraging” everyone to their vision of a cloud-based happy place.

Now new does not always equate to good – and Microsoft have a bit of a dubious history with V1 products and technology. So in this series, I’d like to show you an example of what the SharePoint 2013 new workflow regime can do. The example that I am going to use for this set of articles is useful for this purpose for several reasons:

• 1. It is a common use-case that many organisations would find familiar – particularly those with compliance regimes
• 2. It demonstrates a fairly typical SharePoint consulting “oh crap” moment, where you realise your masterpiece of a solution is completely undone by an untested assumption or a SharePoint caveat that you forgot about.
• 3. It demonstrates a path to redemption that is an excellent utilisation of the new capabilities of SharePoint 2013 and Workflow Manager
• 4. It gives you a great sense as to whether workflows are a real developer, information worker or citizen developer tool. In other words, after reading this, you should have a good idea what you are getting yourself into!

I have a lot to cover, so this series will be multi-part. This first post will outline the scenario that we are dealing with.

The scenario: Document Control at Megacorp

Many organisations operate in industries where they are required to manage documentation in a systematic way. Documents that are subject to any sort of quality or compliance regime are often referred to as “Controlled Documents”. Typically, a controlled document will have an assigned responsible party who is accountable for the management (i.e. approving the issuing of updates) of that document.

To illustrate, consider the document control requirements of Megacorp Inc – a mythical multinational conglomerate with a vide variety of businesses in many different industries and locations. Megacorp is your typical diversified multinational, making everything from Iron Man suits to hamburgers. A managed metadata term set illustrating the Megacorp conglomerate structure can be seen below. If you look closely, Megacorp Inc, actually consists of several companies and each is structured differently. For example: Megacorp Pharmaceutical divides itself based on country and state jurisdiction, whereas Megacorp GM foods divides itself up on the particular food it is generically modifying.

So let’s say that Megacorp is maintaining ISO9001 certification for assurance purposes and therefore has to control their documents as I have stated above. Let’s create a SharePoint site called ISO9001 to handle this requirement. We perform the following steps:

1. Build a term set (called Megacorp Inc)that stores all of the Megacorp businesses (you can see that in the image above)
2. Create a site based on the built-in Document Center template
3. Create a managed metadata site column called Organisation and associate it to the Megacorp term set
4. Add the organisation column to the document library (called Documents) in the Document Center site
5. Enable Metadata Navigation on the Documents library and add the Organisation column as a hierarchy field

For those of you who are new to SharePoint, below are screenshots from those steps to help you with the above steps… I am not going through this stuff in detail, so hopefully this suffices…

 

Now that the above plumbing is done, a few documents have been added to the Documents library and tagged to their organisation. With Metadata Navigation enabled, we now have the easy means to browse and filter documents to the specific organisation who owns them as shown below…

So let’s now think through a workflow scenario. Each organisation that makes up Megacorp has a process owner and when a document is ready for publishing, the process owner needs to approve it. Now we could do this by adding a “Person or Group” column to the document library and call it “process owner.” But Megacorp has some additional considerations that need to be pondered…

• 1. They have thousands of documents in the library
• 2. The process owner is a role, not an individual person. For audit purposes, Megacorp wants to have a record of when a person was in a particular process owner role.

The reason this complicates things is twofold. If we use a person’s user account in Active directory for tagging the process owner, we can easily track when a process owner changes because it will show up in the version history of the documents. But the downside is that we would have to update each document individually when that process owner changes to someone else. Not to mention that we may not want this change to be a version change in the document itself.

Now I know what your thinking – “Just use an Active Directory Group instead of an account”. Yes, it is a good and logical suggestion, since a SharePoint or Active Directory group allows us to easily manage changes in personnel between roles by changing group members. But the downside is that we have no easy way to see the history of who was in the process owner role at a given time because SharePoint would see and store the group, not the members of that group.

So let’s try an alternative approach. We will make a custom list called “Process Owners” and add two columns to it. We will add the Organisation site column that we created and used earlier, and we will add the “Assigned To” column that is built-into SharePoint and used in task lists. This will give us a list of process owners for a given Megacorp company or division. Even better – if we turn on version history on the Process Owners list, we now have a record of who was in the process owner role at any given time because it will show up in the changes in the “Assigned to” field over time.

The image below illustrates the Process Owners list.

So to summarise, we have a document library where all documents are tagged to the organisation that they belong to. We have a list of the process owners for each organisation. To better visualise this, I have drawn an xmind map to show you the Information Architecture of the Megacorp document control site

Now we turn our attention to the document approval workflow. It should be able to:

• Look at a document and determine the Organisation that a document belongs to
• Look in the process owners list for that organisation and then determine the process owner for the organisation by grabbing the information in the “Assigned To” field
• Create an Approval task for the Process owner to approve the release of a controlled document.

Now this all sounds straightforward enough in theory but as we will see as this series progresses, when it comes to SharePoint, theory and reality are two very different things. So in part 2, we will build out the workflow..

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.heretisguidebooks.com