SharePoint Designer Workflow

Some improvements and new activity that I would like to see in the upcoming SharePoint

SharePoint as a platform is hugely successful and comparing MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010; SharePoint 2010 is more refined and feels more solid as Enterprise Content Management System.  Workflow in SharePoint saw a dramatic improvement compared to MOSS 2007. Today, Designer workflows are definitely considered while making decision about choosing SharePoint as a CMS in the enterprise. But there is an opportunity and huge room available for the workflow to be improved in SharePoint 2012 or SharePoint 15.

In 2010 we got more activities standard in designer workflow and another area that got a facelift is using VISIO as a designer tool for developing workflow. As an enthusiastic SharePoint’er  I wish some of these areas can be improved

1.       Improvement in VISIO designer:

·         Allow configurations to be done in VISIO Designer

·         Enable to preview the working of activities in VISIO

·         Integrate Visio Designer into SharePoint (Having the VISIO outside and have to goto Designer to publish is a sticky point in regulated industry)

·         Provide an easier way to include custom activity with custom icon in VISIO

2.       Improvement in Activities

·         Need more standard OOTB activities VIZ:

·         Activity to Create a Site/Site Collection

·         Activity to Create a Library/List

·         Action to query a list to get list items.

·         Allow calculation of business days in date time activity

·         Get User Information for User Information List

·         Create List Items in different Site (This will be good if we can create list items in different location in the site collection)

·         Convert Document /Infopath to PDF (We can use Document Conversion service but if this is available OOTB then it is huge selling point)

·         New Utility Action to Trim white spaces (This is needed while using Multi Lookup)

·         New utility activity for regular expression operation

·         An Activity to Loop through a collection of Items (List of Values in a multi-lookup field)