SharePoint® 2007 and Office Development Expert Solutions

Chapter 8. Creating Custom Workflows for Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server

Businesses are placing greater demands on their employees to make better decisions faster in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. When attempting to come to a decision, we typically follow a series of steps. The steps can be formal in terms of a standard operating procedure or informal in the sense of an implicitly understood way of operating, but collectively they represent a business process. Because these business processes fundamentally require human interaction, making better decisions faster may be limited by human interactions. Therefore, by increasing the effectiveness of human interactions, we can improve the overall efficiency and quality of the outcome. Business processes can be modeled using flow charts and represented using workflow terminology. Software that facilitates and manages this "human workflow" can provide a way of automating the interaction among the people participating in the process and thereby deliver improved effectiveness.

In previous chapters, you have seen how Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) and Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) provide a robust, customizable, and extensible collaboration environment that enables team members to share business information contained in SharePoint data repositories (for example, documents and lists).

Business processes such as document approval can be automated by associating a workflow with the SharePoint ...