One of the challenges I’ve always had with writing workflows is documenting them, especially workflows written in SharePoint designer. As consultants, we inevitably have to turn our work over to somebody to support it. So the handover typically occurs with screenshots from SPD or even a Visio diagram that depicts how the workflow is supposed to work. Its a very time consuming process and can sometimes result in misinterpretation. The same can be said with early stages of workflow design. What’s the best way to sketch out a workflow when mapping out a business process? Depending on the situation, the technique can vary from writing down the narrative on a decision matrix with something like Excel or attempting to create a graphical representation in, again, Visio. In both cases, the design needs to be translated into what SPD “wants”. It can be a frustrating process…
So its nice to see that one of the many enhancements to to workflow in SharePoint Designer 2010 is integration with Visio 2010. You’ll notice this integration immediately in the ribbon.
And it works pretty much as the icons describe. Basically, you can take your work from SharePoint Designer and export it to a file. Specifically, a Visio Workflow Interchange (.vwi) document. You can open Visio and import this document. The result looks like this:
The interesting thing is that once the workflow is imported, you can use Visio to make further customizations. NOTE: At the time of this article, you have access only to workflow conditions. And you can guess by the icons in the ribbon of the following screenshot that the changes can be saved back to the file system and re-imported in SharePoint designer.
In my testing, I found this to be mostly useful for sketching the outline of a workflow, not coding the various activities inside of it. This may change in later releases. However, you can easily see the value of being able to quickly generate a graphical representation of an implemented workflow as a means to provide accurate and useful documentation. And I find the capability of sketching down some thoughts in a diagram and importing them directly into SharePoint Designer for detailed design work to be very intriguing. Both options will reduce the overall cost involved with workflow development.
I should mention that this integration extends to running workflow instances in SharePoint as well. When authoring a workflow in SPD, you now have an option to enable workflow visualization on the workflow status page.
When this is done, SPD generates a visualization for the workflow when it is saved to SharePoint. The actual status of the workflow is then accessible, in graphical form, in the workflow status page. The following screenshot indicates one of two required approvers have approved the request (see green checkbox). Note that clients must have Microsoft Silverlight installed to see Workflow Visualizations in SharePoint.
So now that I think about it, Visio integration brings another party into the fold: the workflow user. Anybody who submits content through a workflow process now has a window into how it actually works (imagine that!). Having insight into the process certainly helps set expectations in advance and can even reduce support requests in some cases. Not to mention this kind of reporting can aid IT staff in troubleshooting where a particular workflow is in its cycle.
So there’s the scoop on Visio integration as I see it now. I’m excited to see the investment in this space and am looking forward to seeing what’s coming in future releases. In particular, I’m curious to know if these capabilities will be extended to WF workflow created in Visual Studio.
