Introduction to workflows

Across your enterprise, teams use Microsoft SharePoint sites to collaborate on documents and share information. You want to build a SharePoint application that improves team productivity and efficiency, but you don’t want to write code. Where do you start?

With Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can design workflows that add no-code application logic to your SharePoint sites and applications. Using the Workflow Designer, you create rules that associate conditions and actions with items in SharePoint lists and libraries. Changes to items in lists or libraries trigger actions in the workflow.

For example, suppose that a team's primary responsibilities are writing, revising, and approving contracts. These contracts are stored in document libraries on the team site. With Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can create a workflow that sends a notification e-mail message to the reviewer when a new contract has been uploaded to the site. At the same time, the workflow creates a task in the Tasks list for the reviewer. When that person reviews the contract and marks the task as complete, different actions are triggered depending on whether the contract is assigned a status of Approved or Rejected.

Team efficiency and productivity improve because the workflow drives the process so that the team can focus on doing the work, rather than on managing the workflow. And no programming is required to build such a solution. By creating rules in the Workflow Designer, you can quickly add interactivity to a SharePoint solution or application.

This article introduces the basics of workflows. When you understand the basic building blocks of a workflow — events, actions, conditions, and steps — you can quickly add application logic to your SharePoint applications.

Important To create a workflow, your SharePoint site must be located on a server running Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

In this article

1. What is a workflow?

2. What are events, actions, conditions, and steps?

· What are events?

· What are actions?

· What are conditions?

· Parallel vs. serial actions

· What are steps?

3. What are workflow forms?

4. Where are workflows stored?

5. Where can I check the status of a workflow?

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