Why Don’t More People Use SharePoint Workflow?
Written by Derek Neiding
I was pretty surprised recently while giving a SharePoint presentation at a San Francisco conference. Of the 60 attendees, only four used Work
flow in SharePoint. My comment back to the audience was this: How can you have collaboration (which is what SharePoint is for) if you don’t have workflow? Most nodded their head in agreement. This exchange got me to thinking…why are so few people leveraging business process automation in SharePoint. Here are some thoughts:
- They don’t understand the process. A SharePoint deployment is typically managed by the IT staff. The IT staff may not know the first thing about the document approval process, the employee review process, the new employee hire process and so on. If you don’t understand a process, you can’t automate it.
- Not enough time. Once again the IT staff is tasked with many things and interviewing process participants and building these complex processes just doesn’t make the list.
- The current process is not ideal. Maybe you do know your process. Maybe you know your process inside and out. But maybe the process leaves a lot to be desired. You think, why automate a bad process? That will just allow us to get more bad things done a lot faster.
- You don’t have the necessary tools. SharePoint gives you templates, SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio as options for creating workflows. Each tool has its pros and cons, but in many cases none of these tools will allow a process owner (i.e. non-IT guy or gal) to create complex business processes. Check-out ShareVis for additional information on solving this issue.
It’s unfortunate that these and similar issues prevent the roll out of SharePoint workflow. As I said at the outset, you can’t have true collaboration without workflow – after all, everything you do is part of some business process. I would encourage you to figure out why you are not using SharePoint workflow and then work to correct the issues.
Tags: process, SharePoint, workflow
Read more posts by Derek Neiding
June 12th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I think most of sharepoint implementations are around shared file folders. This is how people getting sharepoint. 1/shared folders; 2/mysite; 3/message and mail notification. They didn’t come to rest of the stuff. Also, I think this is too complex to understand. Also, MS is confusing users by multiple workflow tools: MOSS, BizTalk, Workflow Foundation. -Oleg
June 22nd, 2009 at 2:42 am
Well, my 2 cents:
Point 1 can be extended to include the business users – often (though not always) they don’t understand their own processes either. When you start looking into what they need, you end up with fantastically complex workflow – which can be difficult in SPD.
Regarding Point 4 – Have you tried creating a Visual Studio workflow? Microsoft tried to drive folks down the route of using InfoPath forms for workflow interaction – but they suck! It’s an amazingly bad development experience. Fields that won’t populate, some that won’t return data, some sections that return properties with values in, and others return XML.
ASP.NET forms are (or at least were, last time I looked) basically undocumented, though there is a Codeplex project which might make them a viable solution.
God help the soul who tries to get modification forms working.
SharePoint designer – now it is better, actually, for simple processes and a ‘business user’ type of user. Shame that the workflows can’t be redeployed, so we can reuse them, or try them on a test system first.
We’ve been using K2 for workflows. It’s not perfect – but InfoPath works better with K2 workflows, ASP.NET workflow forms are easier to write, and we’ve not had any problems with the host not doing things when it should.
So, I guess my experience has been problems with business overestimating their readiness to use workflows, and that the tooling that came out with SharePoint 2007 is less than ideal.
September 11th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Hi -
Great article — people need education in order to visualize the benefits, I think. What do you think about the buzz that Google’s “Wave” will give Sharepoint a run for its money?
- Scott