Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Bible

The Microsoft Office Workflow Environment

The SharePoint development team chose to focus their workflow development efforts around what SharePoint technologies does best, which is share and collaborate on documents. Therefore you will notice that most of the document-centric workflow templates take documents through their typical lifecycle. There is also a heavy focus on human workflow items, which are task-driven processes as opposed to just programmatic automation. The other types of workflows can be addressed using WF and Visual Studio, of course, but you can see the document-centric/human-workflow focus throughout the workflow UI in the browser and SharePoint Designer tool.

Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows SharePoint Services are the fundamental technologies that make up the Microsoft Office Workflow Environment. We move up the complexity continuum starting with browser-based workflow creation to more sophisticated options in the Office SharePoint Designer tool, and finally to full programmatic flexibility with the tools available in Visual Studio.

Windows Workflow Foundation

The Windows Workflow Foundation (or WF) is a common workflow technology for Microsoft products, ISVs, and customer solutions. It is a framework to build on; it is not a server or an application per se. Instead, it should be thought of as a foundation for developers to create workflow applications. The key features include:

• A unified model for human and system workflow

• An extensible activity framework ...