This document discusses future proofing workflow investments in Office 365 and SharePoint Online. It provides tips for developing maintainable custom workflows, including using naming conventions, comments, flow charts, status fields, and separating logic into multiple workflows. It also covers throttling limits, such as a 5000 request limit per 24 hours which can cause workflows to suspend. The document recommends designing workflows to avoid these limits and termination of workflow instances.

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Future Proofing Your Workflow Investment
- How to develop maintainable custom
workflows in Office 365SharePoint Online?
Prashant G Bhoyar (PGB)
Collab365
20 October 2016

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• Born and raised in India
• Came to United States of America in 2007 for
studies
• University of Maryland College Park Alumni
• Technical Reviewer of the book “Pro : SharePoint
2013 Administration”
• Organizer of SharePoint Saturday Baltimore
(SPSBMORE)
• Founder and Organizer of DC-Metro Office 365
User Group
 Monthly in person & online event
 http://www.meetup.com/DC-Metro-Office-365-
User-Group/
• Recipient of Antarctic Service Medal
• Senior Consultant at Portal Solutions
Who AM I ?
Prashant G Bhoyar (PGB)

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About Portal Solutions
We deliver Digital
Workplace Products
and Solutions that help
organizations share
what they know and
find what they need by
connecting people,
data, and content.
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OneWindow Capabilities –
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communities or projects)
People directory and
gateway to other
applications (my apps)
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Next Steps
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Let’s talk. Click here or go to http://www.onewindowapp.com to learn more.

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• Future
• Tips for writing maintainable
workflows
• Throttling Limits in Office 365
• Limitations of SharePoint
Workflows
• Q&A
Agenda

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Typical SharePoint Workflow Life Cycle
Initiation
• When the workflow instance is started on list/library item
Running
• User Interaction via tasks
• Status page reflects the status of the workflows
Termination • End of the workflow instance
Association
• When the workflow is associated with List/Library

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• Browser
• SharePoint 2013 Designer
• Visio 2013
• Visual Studio 2012/2013/2015
• Third Party Tools
• Flow/Logic Apps
Office 365 /SharePoint
Online 2013 Workflow
Tools

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Recent Announcements
• There will NOT be SharePoint Designer 2016
 http://sharepoint-community.net/forum/topics/what-s-happening-to-sharepoint-designer-in-
sharepoint-2016-is-it
• Microsoft Flow
 https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-microsoft-flow-and-announcing-the-
public-preview-of-powerapps/
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What does this mean?
• SharePoint Workflows most probably will have same fate as
InfoPath forms services
 Microsoft will continue to support
 No future enhancements
• Time to explore other options
 Microsoft Flow
 Under Preview https://flow.microsoft.com
 Visual Studio Workflows
 Can deploy them only as “App”
 Other Third Party Products
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• The development/testing experience is
slow
 Because of platform’s architecture
 In general Workflow development is slow
process
 Analogy : Public Transportation System
• Difficult to gather all the requirements
before start of the development
 Be ready for multiple revisions
Lessons Learned

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Naming Convention for Custom Workflows
 Use the naming convention that works best for you and your
organization
 For example, List or Library + ListName + Purpose
• Use activity “Add a comment” to write informative comments in
the workflow
 End users will not see these comments unlike workflow history list
logs

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Have flow chart of the workflow handy
 Use Microsoft Visio
 Pen and Paper works too 
• Implement the logic to stop/start at a particular stage
 Super helpful in case the workflow instance gets terminated
 Super helpful during migration
 Helpful to update the business logic
• Using If condition and a custom variable, we can pick and choose the additional
logging
 Similar to #if debug directive in C#
 The workflow will be long, but it can save a lot of troubleshooting/development time
 End users will not see additional comments in Production 

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Save the Workflow status in a separate field
 Avoid default workflow name
 Helps to divide workflow into multiple workflows
• Create a separate Workflow status field as text
 Gives the ability of filtering and sorting
 Approvers love this option
• Capture the dates of various approval steps
 Helps to generate audit logs/reports

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Review the workflow starting logic
 Limit how many times the workflow gets started
 Make sure they won’t start unnecessarily after the workflow is ended
successfully
• If possible Break down the workflows in multiple WFs
 Helps a lot in development and maintenance
 We can start SharePoint 2010 workflows from SharePoint 2013 only
 We can not start SharePoint 2013 workflows from SharePoint 2013
workflows
 You can use “Wait for field change in current item” to trigger the workflows

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Use new Task List and History list for each workflow
 To create the new tasks list and history list, we can use
 Workflow Settings page
 SharePoint Designer
 SharePoint UI
 OOTB “Workflow Tasks” List has additional notifications
 To turn off -> List Settings – Advanced Settings -> Uncheck “Send e-mail
when ownership is assigned?”

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Don’t create the variable if you don’t have to
 50 is the limit
• Use SharePoint groups to assign the tasks/send emails instead of
individual users
• Keep workflow initiation activity to minimum

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Do not modify the OOTB global workflows
 Create copy and then modify
• Log information in the History List
 Log variables, important info that will be helpful during
debugging/troubleshooting
 End users can see the logs 

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Tips for developing maintainable custom workflows
• Create custom task content types for tasks with only one logical
outcome
• Pay extra attention while modifying the Custom Task content
types
 Task outcome field must be the last field
• Restrict the access
• For large lists, don’t remove the workflow, but set to no new
instance
 Do it in non business hours

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Throttling Limits in Office 365
• In Office 365 workflow manager has strict throttling limits for
SharePoint 2013 Style workflows
• The instance has exceeded the outbound http request quota for a
1.00:00:00 time period. The 5000 request limit was reached in <time>.
 Analogy credit score
• Workflow instances can get suspended and we need to wait 24
hours to resume the suspended workflow instance by
 clicking Resume for the workflow or
 by using the SharePoint Workflow Client Object Model
• Suspended workflow instances will be terminated after 10 days.
Source : https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3076399

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Throttling Limits in Office 365
• The resource limitations are for per workflow in a site collection
in the span of 24 hours
• There is no OOTB email alert if the workflow get suspended
• We can find the suspended workflows on the page
/_layouts/15/WorkflowServiceHealth.aspx
• If we develop workflow as an “App” these throttling limitations
does not apply

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Throttling Limits in Office 365

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Throttling Limits in Office 365 – Design Consideration
• Avoid infinite loops
 We may use “Wait for field change in current item”
• Avoid using a workflow to execute complex algorithms
 Workflows are intended to manage document-driven, human
processes and not to dispatch significant computational tasks.
• Avoid the use of the “Wait for Event in List Item" activity
Source : https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3076399

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Limitations
 We can not start workflows on delete
event
 50 variable limit
 No source control for SPD workflows
 String functions are limited
 For advance implementations you will
need to involve devs/architects
 You can not start the workflows on Task
lists whenever new tasks gets created by
SP2013 style workflows
 Workaround : Create SP2010 style workflow
in Task List

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Questions? Feedback? Contact me:
 Twitter: @PGBhoyar
 Blog: http://pgbhoyar.com (limited contents)
 Email: pgbhoyar@gmail.com
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