Save Time and Money Using SharePoint workflows

Do you want to save time for your business processes and increase productivity at the same time?  Well, SharePoint workflows can provide your organization better control, more efficiency, and increased accountability over your processes. They can be customized according to the business requirements. SharePoint workflows also help businesses to streamline business processes more efficiently.

SharePoint Workflow helps in automating processes that route documents for various types of review of file/files. When you save a file to a document library on a SharePoint Server site, you have three workflows available to you:

• The Approval workflow- This workflow asks everyone to approve a file. For example, before giving a presentation, you might run this workflow so that influential people at your company can approve it.
• The Collect Feedback workflow- This workflow collects feedback. For example, if you are writing a new company policy, you might want feedback from people in various departments. Then later, you can integrate everyone’s feedback into a final version before it becomes official.
• The Collect Signatures workflow- This workflow collects digital signatures from people. You might use this if you want someone to sign an expense report, or a performance review.

Microsoft also developed SharePoint applications to continue with the best practices at workplaces and with the goal of empowering customers and other stakeholders to create their own applications. A number of features and capabilities are introduced in SharePoint 2013 which provides tools that IT professionals and solution creators need to develop SharePoint-based applications and workflow solutions that enhance organizational agility and business process automation.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 introduces some useful new capabilities and features. The following new capabilities and features are particularly relevant to building custom applications.

• Libraries and Lists- SharePoint Services 3.0 introduces a number of new library and list types, which can be used as the basis for SharePoint applications and you can store a lot of data and files in these lists and libraries.
• Content Types- A content type is a reusable collection of settings that is used for content management. It enables to reuse the metadata and behaviours of a document or item type.
• Site Columns- Site columns provide a central, reusable model for column definition or template which are helpful for users to pick for multiple lists across multiple SharePoint sites.
• Workflow- SharePoint workflow is defined as the automated movement of documents or items through a series of actions or tasks for a successful completion of a business processes within an organization.
• Feature Framework- Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 contains a new structure called a “feature” which reduces the complexity involved in making site customizations, leaving out the requirement to copy large chunks of code to make simple changes in the site.
• Event Enhancement- This is used for core events like changes, additions and removal of lists items or list columns. It is also used for deletion of sites and site collections.
• Mobile Device Access - SharePoint Services 3.0 provides new capabilities to the users to browse SharePoint site on their mobile devices easily.

The new features and enhancements in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provide an array of opportunities for the developers. It provides enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business requirements such as content management, site plan or site collections and streamlining business processes. Using Windows SharePoint Services organizations can enable their users to create, manage, and easily build their own SharePoint sites.

How SharePoint Workflow helps in document management

Workflow is the automated process of the documents through a sequence of actions or tasks that are related to a business process. Workflows can be used to consistently manage common business processes within an organization by attaching business logic to documents or items in a SharePoint list or library.

If you are using SharePoint for document management you need to have workflow. The SharePoint management feature helps you to manage your documents efficiently and to achieve that purpose you need to use SharePoint workflow because it helps in streamlining the cost and time required to coordinate common business processes, such as project approval or document review and managing and tracking the human tasks involved with these processes.

The most important solution for document management that SharePoint has ever built is Document Management Workflows. SharePoint Workflow are added to a document library to manage a group of people working together within a company. This tool allows members of the group to complete various tasks that need to be done by different individuals on the same document like approval tasks, send email alerts to the participants with task instructions and a link to the document to be approved and so on. While the workflow is in progress, the workflow owner and the workflow participants can check the Workflow Status page. When the tasks are completed by the participants, the workflow ends, and the owner is automatically notified about it.

Types of documents that are usually processed in a SharePoint Document Management Workflow are:

• Accounts Payable Documents: Invoices, Bills
• Accounts Receivable Documents: Terms of Sale, Credit Card Authorization Form
• Legal Documents: Contracts, Personal Documents

Benefits of using SharePoint 2010 Workflows

SharePoint 2010 solutions provide a powerful workflow feature which helps in improving business processes. It enables organizations to optimize communication and time spent by employees involved in different business processes.

The SharePoint workflow makes business processes more efficient and quick by managing and tracking ‘human tasks’ involved with the process and providing a record of the completed process. Organizations use this workflow feature to manage document creation, expense reporting, employee vacations and more.

The number of human tasks involved in business processes can slow down the speed and quality of decisions. This feature automates and manages this ‘human workflow’ efficiently. This automation results in increased speed, overall effectiveness of the interactions and a reduction in errors.

Benefits of using the SharePoint 2010 Solutions

The primary benefits of using workflows are to facilitate business processes and improve collaboration.

• Approval -   helps in guiding a proposed contract among members of an organization seeking an approval
• Expense reporting -   manages the process of submitting an expense report and associated receipts, also helps in reviewing, approving, and reimbursing
• Technical support -  manages the progress of technical support given to customers, routed to technical experts, resolved and added to knowledge base
• Interviewing -  manages the process of interviewing a job candidate, including scheduling interview appointments, collecting interview feedback, making that feedback available to subsequent interviewers and facilitating decisions
• Content publishing -  manages the approval of the publication of content on the Internet

Share Point 2013 Workflows

Are you looking to set up a SharePoint-friendly website? Well, we would say building a SharePoint website can help in a number of ways:

• The structure and site navigation can be easily altered by the admin. This comes in handy when a user wants to add a new course or an event to his/her website
• Helps save money on website hosting
• Even a newbie, with no technical knowledge, can easily make changes in his/her SharePoint website

SharePoint workflow makes your tasks much simpler by allowing you to design workflows without writing custom codes for your applications. Examples of creating workflows can range from creating tasks such as sending notifications to reviewing a document, reviewing and approving it, and more.

The latest version, SharePoint 2013 workflows brings in newly improved features, which are much more beneficial and advanced than its sister versions. The workflow engine is one of the most notable changes. SharePoint 2010 was using Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5 whereas SharePoint 2013 uses an improved Windows Azure Workflow. The other added enhancements include:

• Easy tracing and monitoring
• Instance management
• Organized service reliability
• Completely Declarative Authoring
• Elastic Scale
• Service Bus Messaging and REST
• Multi-Tenancy and High density

The other major improvements in SharePoint Designer 2013 include some amazing features that can help you build your workflows much easier. They are:

• Newly added visual development tools
• The ability to create/add applications without writing custom codes
• Additional building blocks such as App Step, Stage, and Loop