Workflow in this sector is actually a series of tasks that deliver a result. Concerning SharePoint Products and Technologies, the workflow is defined barely as the automated passing of documents through a sequence of activities or tasks that are dependent on the business process. Workflows can be utilized to manage regular business processes inside an organization by empowering the company to connect business rationale to documents or items in a SharePoint list or library. Business rationale is, in fact, a set of directions that determines and controls the activities that happen to a document or item.
Workflows can streamline the cost and time needed to arrange common business processes, for example, document review, project approval by tracking and managing the human tasks required with these processes. For instance, in a SharePoint site, you can add a workflow to a document library that routes a document to a group of individuals for approval/rejection. At the point when the document creator begins this workflow on a document in that library, the workflow makes document approval tasks, allocates these assignments to the workflow members, and afterward sends an email notification to the members with task instructions and a connection to the document to be affirmed. While the workflow is in advance, the workflow proprietor (for this situation, the archive creator) or the workflow members can check the Workflow Status page to see which members have finished their workflow undertakings. At the point when the workflow members finish their workflow undertakings, the workflow closes, and the workflow proprietor is consequently told that the workflow has finished.
Workflows are preprogrammed small applications that streamline and automate a wide variety of business processes, which may be collecting signatures, collecting feedbacks, approvals for a document or plan, etc. Workflows are designed to save your time and effort and bring efficiency and consistency to any task you perform on a routine basis.
This article is about some preprogrammed workflows included in SharePoint Office 365 in which you can also make customizations that are more extensive or create your own custom workflows from scratch with the help of SharePoint Designer and other applications.
With the SharePoint online for Office 365 for enterprises, the following workflow automation types can be performed. Some processes that you can automate using SharePoint include:
Approval
An approval workflow routes a document or some item to designated people for their approval or rejection.
Collect Feedback
A collect feedback workflow routes a document or other items to designated people for feedback. The collect feedback then consolidates all of the feedback from the participants for the workflow owner and provides a record of the review process.
Collect signatures
The collect signature workflow routes a Microsoft Office document to designated people for their digital signatures. Collect signature workflow works only with word documents, excel workbooks and InfoPath forms.
Disposition approval
The disposition approval workflow is designed to support document management needs within an organization. This manages the documents expiration and retention process by allowing participants to decide whether to keep or delete the expired documents or items. The disposition approval, when started, creates a workflow task for specified documents and items on the task list for the workflow. It provides support for bulk task completion so the record managers can process a large number of items for deletion in a single step.
Three state
The three state workflow is designed to track the status of list items through three states. It can be used to manage business processes that require organizations to track a high volume of issues or items and they are customer support issues, sales leads or project tasks.
To add or start a workflow, you must have a correct permission for the list, library or site collections where the workflow runs:
To add a workflow:
By default, you must have the Manage list permission to add a workflow
To start a workflow:
By default, you must have the edit items permission to start a workflow that has already been added. Alternately, owners can choose to configure specific workflows so that only members of the owner's group can start them.
Workflows can be especially valuable for software engineers or website designers inside an organization. The tasks related to making an application or document could include a wide range of things requiring varied endorsements and the completion of numerous layered and complex tasks. Initiating one of this standard workflow streamlines, automates and simplifies the process from origin, through testing, to deployment. Being ideal, this increases efficiency.
If you have questions about how to integrate and implement these ideas into your operations, or to learn more about our SharePoint management services and how our SharePoint experts can help with your ongoing SharePoint operations, please contact Aufait to discuss a custom solution specifically designed for your enterprise.