Professional SharePoint 2013 Administration

Chapter 16

Installing and Configuring Azure Workflow Server

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• What’s new with workflow?
• Installing and configuring Windows Azure Workflow Server
• Creating workflows in SharePoint 2013

There are very big changes to the workflow architecture and functionality in SharePoint 2013. This version of SharePoint introduces its new workflow partner, Windows Azure Workflow Server. Workflow functionality is now part of a workflow farm, and this farm can be part of the SharePoint farm or installed on separate servers. This change reflects two of the key challenges users faced with SharePoint workflow in the past: performance and scalability. The new workflow architecture addresses these issues head on.

In this chapter you will learn about the new workflow features in SharePoint 2013, and how to install and configure Azure Workflow Server. We also describe some of the capability for creating custom workflows in order to illustrate how business processes are modeled.

ENHANCEMENTS IN WORKFLOW

For many enterprises, the ability to model and automate business processes, and to include these automated processes as part of SharePoint collaboration, is an important goal. To meet this need, Microsoft introduced workflow capability into SharePoint 2007 using the then new Workflow Foundation (WF). WF was introduced with the release of .NET 3.0, and its capability was updated in WF 3.5 and WF 3.5 SP1. As one of the first Microsoft products to utilize WF, SharePoint 2007 provided native ...