With the aim of maximizing business process efficiency, Microsoft SharePoint introduces SharePoint Workflow to help organizations achieve the best output from their collaboration environment. SharePoint Workflow is simply a tool that members of an organization can use to automate some tasks and responsibilities. Functions such as updating entries, sending various alerts and information across an organization, and other complex processes that need human intervention when manually done are now among the things that SharePoint Workflow can cater to.
Simplifying Automation with SharePoint
When speaking of automating tasks, most of our ideas would often lead us to creating lines of codes to arrive at a solution. Fortunately, this is not the case with SharePoint. With its user-friendly environment and a well-designed interface, automating processes can be done by anyone with appropriate SharePoint privileges. Computer users with little computer skills and knowledge can do the task of automating business processes in SharePoint without the need to memorize loads of code or any programming language. All that is needed is SharePoint Designer and everything is set for action. But before anything else, Windows SharePoint Services is required before SharePoint workflow is made possible.
Creating workflow in SharePoint can be done in multiple ways. There is something for advanced computer users and for beginners. For beginners, SharePoint Designer is the perfect tool when creating a customized workflow. Advanced users can grab Microsoft Visual Studio for initiating SharePoint Workflow. A workflow can consist of conditions and actions triggered by events included in the process. Forms to gather user input can also be added to a workflow to make it dynamic. Additionally, SharePoint workflow can be manually started by a user or automatically started once an entry is added or updated.
Conditions and actions present in a workflow require fields and values that in return trigger different responses depending upon the command given. Actions can include sending of emails to respective representatives or instant updating of items within a list. “Else if” statements can also be nested in a workflow for projects that require more evaluation of processes. Conditions that require multiple actions can have the underlying actions performed in a sequence or as a single process.