- What Is Microsoft SharePoint 2010?
- Difference Between SPF and SharePoint Server
- What Is a Site?
- What Is a Personal Site?
- What Is a Ribbon?
- What Is a List?
- What Is an External List?
- What Is a Document Library?
- What Is a Wiki Page Library?
- What Is a Form Library?
- What Is an Asset Library?
- What Is a Slide Library?
- What Is a Picture Library?
- What Is a View?
- What Are Web Parts?
- What Are Alerts?
- What Is a Site Column?
- What Is a Content Type?
- What Is Tagging?
- What Is Managed Metadata?
- What Are Versions?
- What Does Check-in/Check-out Mean?
- What Is a Workflow?
What Is a Workflow?
In SharePoint, a workflow is a series of steps—some automatic, some manual—that must be performed as part of a business process for a document or a list item.
For example, the most common workflows for documents are review and approval. Some important documents (for example, contracts) need to go through several steps of approval from different people before they can be officially considered final and published. An example of starting such a workflow is shown in Figure 1.29.
Figure 1.29 Starting an approval workflow to publish a page.
Another example is pages in a site itself. In some SharePoint environments, each change to a page needs to be approved by the site's manager to make sure the contents of the page comply with the company's policies.
SharePoint enables developers to develop workflows and attach them to documents or list items. End users might be expected to interact with a workflow, either approving documents or items or triggering a workflow to start or stop.
Chapter 11, "Workflows," covers the common tasks involved with workflows.