presented at SharePoint TechFest Houston 2016

1. SharePoint Workflow
Best Practices

2. About me
• Vadim Tabakman
• Lead Technical Evangelist, Nintex
• Over 20 years consulting, development and corporate IT experience
• End user advocate

3. Introduction
• There are more best practices and errors to avoid
• Based on real-world projects
• Advice applies to any workflow product
• No demos

4. SharePoint Workflow
and Multiple History Lists

5. Why Not One Workflow History List?
• History Lists are just SharePoint lists
• Performance degradation with 2000-4000 items
• Multiple Workflows and One History List
• Grows very quickly
• Multiple Workflows and Multiple History Lists
• Shares the load.
• Faster to access workflow history

6. Don’t Always Use
SharePoint Workflow

7. Good Uses of SharePoint Workflow
• Managing how people work
• Document approval & feedback
• Collaborative reviews & discussions
• Gathering signatures

8. Good Uses of SharePoint Workflow
• Automating some of SharePoint’s behavior
• Approve site creation requests
• Parse incoming email in a list and act on it
• Publishing items to target
• Moving documents through lifecycles

9. Possible Uses of SharePoint Workflow
• Manipulating other applications, data sources
• Employee onboarding
• Resource scheduling
• SharePoint lists become work queues

10. Bad Uses of SharePoint Workflow
• Transaction-oriented processes
• Blocking or modifying activity
• Application-to-application service activity
• Aggressive data transformations
• Work that doesn’t involve SharePoint at all

11. Plan to Fail

12. Consensus May Not Exist
• Get 3 employees and 1 manager together
• Talk about a process
• Little agreement
• Documentation disagreement, too

13. The Process Will Change

14. Exceptions are Initially Ignored
• Rarely is this considered in advance
• Rarely does everyone agree
• Ignored exceptions lead to bypass

15. Initial Failure as a Winning Strategy
• People do not want to hear these hard truths.
• You may have to create an initial workflow just to show how awful a
process is.
• Only then can you change it.

16. Process
Step
Step
Step
Start Simple
Automate
this
first
Automate
these
later

17. Focus on Everyday Process

18. Everyday Processes
• Steal time
• Get in the way
• Annoy users

19. Everyday Processes
• Have few stakeholders (even if many participants)
• Are easier to automate
• Free up time to focus on more critical stuff

20. Everyday Processes
• Automating them trains users how to think

21. When to use a :
List Workflow
Site Workflow
Reusable Workflow Template

22. Reusability
• You should think about reusability first
• Save yourself time
• Save your colleagues time
• Save your business time and money
• Is a List workflow the best solution for you?
• It’s probably the quickest and easiest, but is it the best solution?

23. What if I can’t do what I need to
with the given actions?

24. Extensibility???
• Web Service calls – Call HTTP web service action
• 21 web services, just from SharePoint itself
• 3rd party LOB systems which have web services
• 3rd party SharePoint solutions that exposes web services
• Build Custom Web Service
• Build Custom Actions

25. Put Forms in Their Proper Place

26. The Form is the User Interface
• Not the workflow
• Not the data

27. If (x and y) then
do this
do that
End if
If (user is Bob) then
do this and that and the other thing
undo that
End if
If (x and y) then
do this
do that
End if
If (x and y) then
do this
do that
End if
If (user is Bob) then
do this and that and the other thing
undo that
End if
If (x and y) then
do this
do that
End if

28. Form-Only App Problems
• Hidden logic
• Disconnected logic
• Security
• Complexity without code
• Inheritance / Knowledge Transfer

29. Presentation Process Integration
Think About the Whole App

30. Make the Workflow Do the Work
• Documented
• Auditable
• Easier to change
• Easier to manage

32. One Form Per Step
• Submit
• Start
• Task

34. Task Forms
• Workflow can route new data
• New data can be written to original form
• All info can be sent to other places

35. Self-Reporting Workflows

36. Least-Loved Techniques
• Browsing individual history entries
• Building custom reports

37. You’re Already Using SharePoint
• The list itself can be the report
• Users can sort, group, filter on metadata (Leverage Views!)
• Write progress information to item properties
• Stage Workflows already do this

38. Summary
• Don’t always use SharePoint Workflow
• Plan to fail
• Focus on everyday processes
• It’s not about forms
• Self-reporting workflows

39. Questions?