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)

Nintex Page Not showing in List

Nintex Workflow is one of common and most sought after 3rd party Workflow engine in SharePoint because of its intuitive interface to configure workflow and the wealth of activities available for non-technical person in the organization to quickly create a Workflow in SharePoint environment. I recently encountered an issue with Nintex Workflow which I think is unusual but I still want to discuss this because it may be useful to someone who might encounter this as there is no good information available in Nintex documentation or in their forum.  nintex connect

I have Nintex Workflow 2010 installed and had put together a simple workflow for document management and approval. This Workflow was published in a Library and was working fine. A week ago we created a SharePoint page and added the Library web part with a view created.

Today when we wanted to change the workflow a little bit to include different approval department I navigated to the page where we added the Library previously and try to open the Nintex Workflow Management Page, to my surprise the management page nor the Nintex Workflow Create page is not found, but the workflow is still starting as soon as the document is added because it is set to start automatically.  

 

After poking around for some time and digging deep in the page I found that the List web part that was added earlier had “Toolbar type” set as summary toolbar. This has caused the Nintex Workflow page to not to show up. This I think is a bug with Nintex because if we can see SharePoint Designer Workflow management page we should also be seeing 3^rd part workflow management pages. 

Changing to Full Tool bar

 

Management Page started appearing again.

This could happen in default List Page in SharePoint if for some reason you wanted to have summary tool bar and not full tool bar.

 Hope this helps someone.

<Update>

This issue is not a bug as I noted earlier as you can see from Nintex Support in the comments. Thanks Nintex Support for your clarification. It appears that this is an issue with custom ribbon buttons.

</Update>

File Name is Locked for editing by another user

Yesterday I was at a client place trying to steer them in getting there processes automated with SharePoint and Workflow. I already have created a test workflow for them to do a Demo to their executives. It was a simple workflow that sends the document for approval and publishes it to PDF. The IT team was preparing for demo by testing the workflow. When they kicked the workflow one of the reviewer opened the document for review and added his comment and about to check in but the Microsoft Word crashed and he had to close the application. When he tried to open the document again from the library he started getting the error shown below.






The Library is not force checkout enabled nor the document is checked out. Further the document shows is checked out to the same person.

The reason why he was seeing the error is because in SharePoint when you open a document for editing SharePoint places a write lock on the document. If Word crashes or the application is force closed the lock is not released and there is no manual way to unlock the document. The solution is to wait for 10 minutes before trying to edit the document. If you wait for 10 minutes SharePoint releases it lock and the document returns to normal state.




Hope this helps some one. You can find more information on this in this KB article here.