Here's my session from TechEd. The Old workflows running within the Office 2007 environment is an exciting and interesting prospect.
A couple of thoughts come to mind:
What does
Office 2007 Platform do well with respect to Workflows:
1. The whole User Interface thing interfacing to the workflow. This could be using Infopath forms (also web based with Forms Server).
2. Using Tasks/History lists for tracking and interaction with a running workflow
3. No need to worry about the WorkflowRuntime
Some other points to consider:
1. WorkflowRuntime is hidden from the developer
2. Office Activity classes are mostly sealed at the moment.
Since workflows are Document Centric (usually involving one document) we have to use metadata with the document to incorporate workflows that involve a series of documents. e.g. a series of document links to the other related documents within Sharepoint.
Design Thoughts:
When designing workflows within the Office 2007 platform, you have to consider where the metadata is going to go that typically drives the workflow.
i.e. If there is a document involving Course development, you'll want various properties that guide the document through states in a workflow. DueDate, Course Code and Cost Centre for an example.
Within a BizTalk environment we can use structures like:
<CourseRequest>
<Header>DueDate....Course Code....Cost Centre</Header>
<Body>
......anything.....(document)
</Body>
So the (at the moment as far as I can see) the Office 2007 story is that we extend a document library and add a series of custom columns (which is pretty normal in the grand scheme of things)
Now, when the workflow kicks off (behind the document) it usually modifies a series of task entries within the associated Task List.
While you can always get back to the source document within the Workflow using the APIs (as the document), typically the Task Item who's before and after properties are sent to the workflow. Usually a workflow will wait for the user to make changes to the Task Item through a custom form or the standard form, and then react.
These Task Item properties would need to be connected to the original document of Cost Centre, Due Date etc.....
A suggestion here is to use
lookup fields to the original document library.
Here's my slide deck anyway - one day I'll get in to writing this up.
Developing Workflows for the 2007 Microsoft Office System and Windows SharePoint Services (version 3) OFC306.zip (1.87 MB)And the results (out of 9 for some strange reason)
Overall Results
| 21 | 6.95 | 7.00 | 7.65 | 7.30 | 6.90 | 7.17 | 7.16 |