Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Designer 2007

9.3. SharePoint Designer Workflow Considerations

As you have seen, SharePoint Designer workflows provide many powerful actions for manipulating the information in your site. There are limits to this functionality, however, and some areas where you should be cautious of the ramifications of your choices.

9.3.1. Limitations

One of the key limitations to SharePoint Designer workflows is that they are bound strictly to the list on which they are created. You cannot directly move a SharePoint Designer workflow to a different list. However, if you create a template based on a site containing a SharePoint Designer workflow, then, when you create a new instance of the site, an appropriate workflow for the new location is created.

SharePoint Designer creates workflows that can execute actions either in sequence or in parallel. While SharePoint's built-in workflows offer a state-based execution flow, SharePoint Designer workflows do not. There is no built-in looping or iteration mechanism. For example, you cannot create a SharePoint Designer workflow that automatically performs an action on every item in a list.

SharePoint Designer workflows use a tasks list to coordinate their functions. This list is always the list called Tasks. If that list doesn't exist, the first workflow you create automatically creates a Tasks list as well.

If you have multiple workflows defined on a list or library, and you invoke a workflow on an item in that list (whether manually or automatically), you cannot ...