Real World SharePoint® 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 22 MVPs

Chapter 10. Automating Business Processes

By Asif Rehmani

When the word "automation" comes to mind in terms of software, the first thing many people think of is the need to know coding or programming. Although writing structured code is probably the best way to achieve automation for large systems with complex requirements, that's not always the only need for automation of processes in the marketplace. More often than not, it's usually a knowledge worker sitting in an office somewhere just trying to automate a process that's currently manual in nature. That person might first try to get the folks in the IT department to tackle this project for him or her.

However, in today's world, the IT departments of most companies are already pretty busy with the projects that relate to the core business of the company, or projects that have high visibility with the executive team. The knowledge worker's projects usually get pushed down as the eleventh project on the list of top ten projects.

SharePoint to the rescue! The SharePoint platform is the perfect fit for those "eleventh projects," because it enables knowledge workers to create powerful solutions with the use of out-of-the-box technologies without the need to write any code! Because SharePoint already contains the building blocks capable of building solutions on top of this platform, the knowledge worker just needs the proper tools to help create those solutions.

This chapter examines these tools, and discusses who should use them, as well ...