One thing I wanted to get out of the SharePoint Conference 2009 is to see how much has been added to the built-in workflow and how it compares to capabilities of some of the external tools, K2 being the one I'm most familiar with. Whoops...the the K2 and Nintex sessions were scheduled at the same time as the SP workflow session...by accident?...a little friendly competition, maybe? (they did reschedule sessions)
So what is new with 2010:
- Visual display of running workflow progress
- Do not need to be tied to a tied to a list item
- Site workflows - not just tied to a content type or list
- Reusable declarative workflows can be designed
- Import workflows from SharePoint Designer to Visual Studio
- New actions (read/write to external lists, doc set and record mgmt, manager, user profile lookups)
- Solution packaging (.wsp)
- SharePoint Designer 2010
- Ability to edit out of the box workflows (Copy or Modify, Example: logic for whether approver is needed or not)
- data binding enhancements for including workflow data and specifying format
- sort of straightforward UI for If/Then/Else targeted as business users
- has the ribbon (it's everywhere now)
- Impersonation control (run as workflow author instead of workflow initiator for access to resources)
- Two-way import/export between Visio and SharePoint Designer
- Task process customization (what to do when a task is assigned, pending, expires, deleted, completes)
- Create custom declaritive activites in Visual Studio that you can then use in SharePoint Designer
So, while there are bunch of good improvements, there still seem to be limitations that keep the other workflow products and/or custom Visual Studio development:
- Create non-declarative workflows (non-sequential state machines, looping) - seems like a pretty big deal
- Custom forms or use of different forms at different points in the workflow (I think you have to use the same InfoPath form or list form throughout) - another big deal
- As far as I can tell workflows are till tied to a site so no easy way to see all my tasks across sites
- I'm still not sure what the versioning story is and need to get more understanding there
- No statistics across workflows or view of all the running instances of a particular type
- The SharePoint Designer is improved, but still kind of confusing - still need tech-savvy user in my opinion
- Visio designer was ok for light-weight framing, but didn't add a ton of value and it looks like once you import it, you don't get to work with it in the visual display which seems like an odd experience
In a future post, I want to start comparing in a grid the different workflow options (SP2007, SP2010, blackpoint, blackpearl, Nintex, others) and the features they have and really understand which tools are right for different scenarios.
SharePoint Conference 2009 kicked off this week with a keynote address from Jeff Teper (CVP, Office Business Platform) and Steve Ballmer (you know who he is). I thought I'd highlight some of the main themes touched on during the presentation and try to drill in to detail in some other posts as I dig in more.
- Developer Experience Improvements
- Install on Vista or Windows 7 (huge - no more need to do dev on VPC)
- Visual Studio 2010 tooling enhancements (F5 experience, designers for packaging)
- Developer dashboard - can enable page trace info with more detail
- SharePoint Designer improvements (they say it's even for devs who are used to Visual Studio...hmm...)
- SharePoint Online
- Hosting SharePoint in the cloud instead of onsite
- This could be for intranet or extranet solutions
- Business Connectivity Services
- New two-way access to outside business data that was previously read-only
- Enhancements to Search
- FAST search (FAST was acquired by MS)
- Improved search options and display, including preview support of Office docs
- Improved User Interface/Interaction
- UI is ajax-enabled and the Ribbon is now used for context-sensitive actions (Check-out, insert web part, etc.)
- Better support for xhtml standards and multiple browsers
- Remote/Offline access through SharePoint Workspace (next generation of Groove)
- Lists and Document Library Improvements
- Support for tens of millions of docs or items
- "Taxonomy management" - controlling the metadata values at the enterprise level
- Improved UI for slicing the data
- Easier Administration
- PowerShell is now what is used for everything (over 500 commands, "what if" command to preview what would happened, Remote managment from Windows 7)
- Usage logging to database that will have a published schema to allow custom reports
- MS has been "dog fooding" by doing the SharePoint Online hosting (i.e. they want it to be easy, too)
- Social Computing
- Social tagging and additional ways to follow and find people (Facebook-like features in the workplace)
- Encouraging more use of my sites
- Multiple SKUs now depending on intranet/extranet/internet/search
I was a little surprised that workflow wasn't really discussed much since that is something I've looked at a lot. There was a lot of focus on the SharePoint Online offering which is probably because of the complexity of managing a SharePoint infrastructure.
The talk definitely highlighted that SharePoint is a platform. As I've been talking to people attending the conference, that is apparent. SharePoint 2010 (and 2007) is a beast and everyone is trying to understand how to best use it for their needs.