expert sharepoint 2010 practices, Complete IT Books Pack
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For your convenience Apress has placed some of the front
matter material after the index. Please use the Bookmarks
and Contents at a Glance links to access them.
Contents at a Glance
About the Authors.................................................................................................
About the Technical Reviewer............................................................................
Acknowledgments.............................................................................................
Chapter
Workflows.............................................................................................
Chapter
Bridging the Office-SharePoint Gap....................................................
Chapter
Leveraging Content Types...................................................................
Chapter
Automating Document Assembly........................................................
Chapter
Practical Document Management with SharePoint 2010..................
Chapter
Forms Services and InfoPath............................................................
Chapter
The SharePoint 2010 Client Object Model.........................................
Chapter
Extending SharePoint Using Event Receivers...................................
Chapter
Touch Points–Integrating SharePoint 2010 and ASP.NET.................
Chapter
Client-Side Programming................................................................
Chapter
SharePoint and Windows Phone
Development............................
Chapter
SharePoint Solution Deployment.....................................................
Chapter
Business Intelligence......................................................................
Chapter
Business Connectivity Services......................................................
Chapter
Designing Mashups with Excel and Visio.......................................
Chapter
Tips, Tricks, and Traps....................................................................
Chapter
PerformancePoint Services.............................................................
CONTENTS AT A GLANCE
Chapter
Public-Facing SharePoint Sites.......................................................
Chapter
Claims-Based Authentication in SharePoint 2010..........................
Index...................................................................................................................
C H A P T E R 1
Workflows
These days organizations have two possible ways to get ahead of each other. One is by working harder
and the other is by working smarter. Now we all know how much working hard gets you ahead, not
much! So it all boils down to working smarter. Working smarter simply means achieving more by doing
less. This means finding someone else to do your work, so you don't have to do it, conventionally
referred to as outsourcing. Interestingly, we know that doesn't go too far either! Therefore, the only long
term and viable alternative that organizations have discovered to better productivity is to automate.
Automate more and more processes. Automation in an office environment means creating software that
supports business processes that involve numerous roles, people, and perhaps, even external systems.
As a result of following those automated processes, there is never a confusion on whose turn it is
next to approve a certain project proposal so it can be efficiently routed to a customer. In contrast, when
a serious exception occurs based on predefined rules, appropriate people can be emailed so human
intervention can be involved where necessary. By following these processes in a system setup, you can
be assured that no particular step was missed. There is no need to double check, because the computers
are doing that double-checking for you. Finally, by working through the process defined in a computer
system, you are also collecting historical information that can be looked at later or archived using one of
the many ways to manage SharePoint data as you have already seen in this book.
To support this endeavor, a new player was introduced in .NET 3.0 called as the Workflow
Foundation! SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 leverage Workflow foundation to provide the
capability of authoring and running workflows in SharePoint as well. In other words, SharePoint can act
as a workflow host.
Now you might argue that everything I described so far about creating automated business
processes in software can be hand-coded from scratch. You'd find me agreeing with you—not
everything needs workflow foundation. In fact, using workflow foundation introduces some additional
complexity and also ties you down to a certain way of doing things. But, it gives you so much other stuff
on top, that maybe in some instances it makes sense to represent complex long-running business
processes using workflow foundation. In terms of SharePoint 2010, the following interesting facilities
become available to you should you choose to author your business processes in SharePoint Workflows.
•
Everything that workflow foundation gives you, such as the reliability of long-
running processes to last across machine reboots, is made available to you, if you
represent your business processes as workflows in SharePoint.
•
Ability to visualize the workflow graphically, so the end users can view the current
flow. The running progress of a workflow is made available using Workflow
Visualization using Visio if you use Workflow in SharePoint 2010.
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