SharePoint 2007 ECM Starter Kit and Workflow

ECM Starter Kit Update and Workflow Questions

Eilene Hao has provided early access to the update to the ECM starter kit for beta 2 TR so go check out her blog.  I know a lot of customers have been waiting for this.  So what's new vs beta2?  Well if you read her blog then you would know.........so go read it.

ok, I'm really glad for the white paper "How to add activities to SharePoint Designer".  I have been doing this (or hacking my way thru this.....) for awhile so this tells me how to do it correctly.  Good work.  Well, I know there is still some confusion out there between the use of SPD and VS2005 re: Workflow creation.  So, SPD provides the ability to create workflows without writing any code.  SPD exsposes the OOTB workflow activities as actions that users "glue" together into a business process.  An activity is the basic unit of functionality in a WinWF workflow.  The actions describe the desired functionality including any parameters and the data binding to those parameters.  Many business processes require greater functionality than the OOTB activities provide so new activities will need to be created.  This is where VS2005 comes into play.  This document describes the process for creating a VS2005 custom activity and expose it as an action in SPD.  Coool.  ......................Still confused?  Go check out:

Developer Introduction to Workflows for Windows SharePoint Services V3 and SharePoint Server 2007

A related and common question I get from customers is:

Q: Is it possible to open up and edit workflows in Visual Studio which are created by SPD?   Well, the answer is no.  SPD creates workflows that are data driven, stored in the SQL database and ready for immediate use without "formal" deployment.  SPD workflows have much smaller scope and can only be used by a single list or library.  VS2005 creates activities and workflows that are compiled assemblies that must be deployed to the server and their use covers a greater scope.  Now for those who think, I should be able to use VS2005 to "edit" SPD workflows, well you know as soon as I knew you couldn't I had to try.  Can you take the XOML file created by SPD and open it in VS2005?  Well, yes you can, duh......it's just XML.  So, I've hacked my way thru this but definitely not recommended and practically not re-applicable across sites because of hard-coded IDs.  Annnd thats all I'm going to say about thaaat...

Other question:

Q: Will beta 2 SPD workflows be editable by SPD beta 2 TR?   Problems opening the workflow?  Well, you need to make some manual changes to the XOML markup.  Open your XOML file as XML in SPD.  Find each instance of the WorkflowDataField element in the XML, remove the InitExpression attribute entirely.  Save and close the file.  Double click on the XOML file (or use the Open Workflow dialog) to reopen it in SPD as XOML.  The DataType element of the "set field to value action" also needs to me removed.

Oh, remember that after you did your conversion to beta 2TR from beta 2 you needed to run STSADM:

STSADM –o reconvertallformtemplates

Cool Workflow

Go check this one out and download it from here.  I saw this one the other day and tested it --- it lets you create a Word 2007 document as one of the steps within your custom workflow.  Coooool. 

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