Professional SharePoint® 2007 Records Management Development: Managing Official Records with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007

Chapter 15. Using Workflow to Manage Records

One thing that is striking about enterprise content management in general is the dynamic interplay that exists between content and business processes. This should not be surprising, since all business processes depend on information in some form. However, understanding the converse relationship — how content depends on business processes — requires a different level of examination and ultimately may lead to the construction of different kinds of tools.

Business processes certainly produce as well as consume information. Indeed, the very purpose of many business processes, particularly those focused on document creation, is to do precisely that. But there are other processes that may produce or modify content simply as by-products of their primary function, and those by-products feed into yet other processes in a semi-coordinated dance that hopefully brings us closer to the holy grail of "increased productivity."

Consider the lowly expense report — clearly one of the most underappreciated mainstays of the business report pantheon. Whether filling it out directly or indirectly through a form, each row in the report might spawn any number of separate and distinct business processes. There could be a line-item approval workflow that is conditionally invoked for any expense item with an amount greater than a specified threshold value. Even the determination of that value might be the result of a separate business process run periodically to ...