Do you want to use declarative, scalable and robust workflows? Do you want to get rid of 3rd party workflow products in your SharePoint farm? Do you want to have visual designer support and easy extensibility? Do you want to be able to deploy the same workflows automatically to all staging environments? SharePoint 2013 workflows is one of the most exciting new features in SharePoint and provides all these features. One serious limitation is the somewhat un-polished state of the current user, developer and administrator experience. This session will walk you safely through this feature set from beginning to the end and enable you to use SharePoint 2013 workflows today. You will see some good and easy scenarios on how to install the workflow infrastructure, how to create, deploy and maintain workflows. While doing so you will get to know lots of tricky details from hard-learned real-life experience with the product. You will learn about the common pitfalls and errors when installing the workflow infrastructure, show you how to automate, trouble-shoot, reconfigure, develop, maintain and deploy workflows. All workflow examples are created in SharePoint Designer and PowerShell is used to automate infrastructure setup and workflow deployment. As opposed to SharePoint 2010 workflows the new workflow infrastructure, Workflow Manager, is detached from the product and must be installed separately. This gives you the option to host the workflow engine on isolated servers (one or more) and hence provides a great deal of flexibility. This setup requires Workflow Manager Client, IIS web server, Workflow Manger and Service Bus installation accompanied with a couple of SQL server databases. UI configuration tools as well as a PowerShell snap-in are provided by Microsoft. The communication from workflows to SharePoint relies on the SharePoint REST API. Workflow designers must have a good understanding of REST services and JSON to use the capabilities fully. I used this slide deck for my presentation during the SharePoint Saturday 2014 in Stockholm (25th January 2014).

1. Workflows 2013 Ups and Downs
#SPSSTHLM10
Bernd Rickenberg (@bernd.rickenberg)
Pointwork
January 25th, 2014
SharePoint Saturday
Stockholm

2. Gold
SharePint
Bronze
Raffle

5. 

Architecture Overview
Creating Workflows
 Deploying Workflows
 Nintex vs. Microsoft
 References

6. 


•
•
•
•

9. 
Architecture Overview
 Installing the Infrastructure

Deploying Workflows
 Nintex vs. Microsoft
 References

10. 



Version
Issue
RTM
Call web service action
does not keep values
15.0.4433.1506
KB2752031, 11-12-2012
Ok
15.0.4454.1000
KB2767858, 12-02-2013
Ok
15.0.4535.1507
KB2768006, 08-10-2013
Error when switching to
Visio view
15.0.4551.1003
KB2837633, 10-12-2013
Visio export not working

12. 
Architecture Overview
 Installing the Infrastructure
 Creating Workflows

Nintex vs. Microsoft
 References

13. 


•
•
•
•
•

15. 
Architecture Overview
 Installing the Infrastructure
 Creating Workflows
 Deploying Workflows

References

16. Nintex 2013
Azure Workflows
Activities
100+1
36
Custom activities
Yes
Yes
Workflow Engine
WF 3.5
WF 4.5
Visual Designer
Yes
Yes
Deployment
NWF
XAML
Requires
developer skills
Depends
Still

17. Nintex 2013
Azure Workflows
Activities
361
36
Custom activities
No
No
Workflow Engine
WF 4.5
WF 4.5
Visual Designer
Yes
Yes
Deployment
XAML
XAML
Requires
developer skills
Depends
Still

18. 




Architecture Overview
Installing the Infrastructure
Creating Workflows
Deploying Workflows
Nintex vs. Microsoft

19. http://www.harbar.net/archive/2013/07/26/Article-Workflow-Manager-Farms-for-SharePoint-2013-PartOne-Core.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn508412.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kaevans/archive/2013/04/05/inside-sharepoint-2013-oauth-context-tokens.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kaevans/archive/2013/08/25/creating-a-fiddler-extension-for-sharepoint-2013-apptokens.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj193441(v=azure.10).aspx