Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation on SharePoint Designer 2007 Workflows at the Kentucky SharePoint User Group last night.  We had a great turnout and had lots of great interaction.  I want to give a special thanks to Jeremy Sublett of Composable Systems and Greg Kamer of Mirazon for their selfless efforts in running this user group for us.

You can download the slide deck HERE. 

Here is a quick synopsis of the presentation:

• What are Workflows?
• Out of the Box WSS and MOSS Workflows
• SharePoint Designer Workflows
• The parts of a SPD WF
• The ootb actions
• The wf files that are created
• The wf forms that are created
• The browser screens for interaction with the wf
• Common Problems, Issues, and Limitations

Thanks!

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I have been dealing with some issues concerning the Yes/No column in SharePoint, and I ran across this blog post by John Ross.  He shares some good information in it, and he helped push me over the edge with the opinion that I was beginning to form about Yes/No columns—that you are better off just using a Choice column with the text values of “Yes” or “No” rather than an actual Yes/No column. 

Read John’s blog post to discover his reasons.  One of my main reasons is this:  You will have to deal with the values from these fields showing up as “True” and “False” if you want to display them through a SharePoint Designer Workflow (e.g. in an email).  If it is not acceptable to have them display as True/False, then you will have to add some more complex steps to your workflow that first test for what the value of your Yes/No column is and set a variable to the text of “Yes” or “No” based on what the value of your column is.  Then you will have to use this variable to display the value of your Yes/No column throughout the rest of the workflow.

By having to deal with these extra problems (mine and those that John points out), I am of the opinion that it is usually best to simply use a Choice column rather than a Yes/No column unless you have a legitimate business reason to have to use the Yes/No column.  Thanks for your insight, John.

When you are creating workflows with SPD you may find that you need more than one Task type.  For example, you may have a VP Approval Task and a Job Posting Announcement task that get created at some point in the workflow.  Well, outside of the SharePoint Designer world you may choose to use separate Task lists for these different types of tasks.  However, SPD workflows will not let you specify a Task list when you are creating Task list items, either by using the “Create Task Item” action or “Collect Data from User” action.  So, if you have 5 different tasks being created by the SPD workflow, then all 5 task types must go into the same Task List.  Well, what if you need different workflow actions to take place based on which Task Type was added to the list?

I have found no way around getting SPD workflows to enter different Task Types into separate Tasks Lists, but I have found a simple and reliable way to be sure that you can do different actions based upon which Task Type has been created in the list through a secondary workflow.  Using the “IF” conditional branches, along with the Content Type field, will save the day when you have multiple Task Types being added into the same Tasks List by SPD Workflows and you need different things to happen based on which Task Type was created.  So, what you need to do is this:

1. Create separate IF branches in one step (or separate Steps if you prefer—the workflow will simply skip over a step in the case of the IF statement not being TRUE) for each Task type that contains the actions that you want to take place for that task type
   

   

2. On each IF statement, for each Task Type, you need to choose “IF Content Type equals TaskType.”  **This is important, see below.
   

** Anytime you create a task list item through a SPD workflow a Content Type is created on the Task list with the same name as what you called the Task List Item.  You will notice that the Title field contains the same text as the Content Type, for example if the Task is called “ManagerApproval” then both the Title field and the Content Type field will contain the text “ManagerApproval” when the task is created by the SPD workflow.  However, I have found that trying to make the IF statement be “IF Title equals TaskType” just simply doesn’t work sometimes.  I’m not telling you why, because I don’t know.  Just suffice it to say that using Content Type for the IF branches instead of Title has worked for me every time.