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This chapter is from the book ๏”€

This chapter is from the book

What Is a Workflow?

In SharePoint, a workflow is a series of stepsโ€”some automatic, some manualโ€”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

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.

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