SharePoint Designer 2013 Workflow enhancements

sharepoint designer 2013 workflows ship with a lot of new enhancements here I'll be showing you some of those new capabilities such as stages the copy/paste functionality and also the visual designer that lets you design and configure the workflows in a visual design in this example I'll start by making a list workflow on the announcements list it's going to be called announcement approval and it will be a SharePoint 2013 workflow when the designers space it starts up it's gonna have a stage which I would strongly recommend you change the name of I'm making it starting here's all different actions that are available for this workflow lots of different actions the one that I care about right now is going to be setting the workflow status and that's just gonna show up the status is gonna show up in the list or library as a column so in this case I'm calling it starting simply so the person would know that the workflows starting now I'm putting a log message in there after the starting statement it's gonna be logged to the history of the workflow another action here this is going to be assigning a task so I want to make a new task for a person any activity looks like the following first I can assign the participant in this case I'll do a lookup to find the person named Garth when I find him I'm gonna go ahead and assign him this task and the task title specifically is going to be to approve the announcement and description I'll allow here to let him know that it is required that he approve this announcement after that we'll move forward to the task options and say wait for this task to complete then in the task creation there's an email editor that I can use to define exactly what email that I want to be sent and here's going to say that you have a new task assigned by and then the actual person who assigned the task that person's name going to be in the workflow context as the initiator now I want to bring back the initiators displayname okay so that's what's going to be in the email that's going to get sent to guard the fort the options for the outcome there's only a couple to start with approved and rejected but you can change it if you wanted to to have more because it is a sight column and the site now before I do the transition first stage to a different stage let me go ahead and make a new stage and the stage will be named approving announcement I need a couple of actions from the prior stage so for then I can just go ahead and select them holding down the shift key and then actually just copy them just like that either ctrl C or using the copy icon in the ribbon and then using the paste icon I can go ahead and paste it or ctrl V and then I can go ahead and change the actual properties and here I'm going to change it to approved and then also the log statement is gonna say workflow is approved now for the transition stage I'll start typing and go to and then here my options end of workflow is what I want in this case I'm gonna go ahead and take this whole stage now select it click on the copy and then paste it down below when doing so it's gonna say that an exact stage exists and it's going to name at stage 3 or the next stage number which is easy to go ahead and change the name of the stage now to rejecting announcement once again you can go ahead and change the status the log workflow appropriately to reject it and there it is now it's gonna have the same effect as previous that's going to go to end of workflow for the first days I need to put a conditional format a conditional statement here saying that if if the actual outcome which is under the workflow variable is approved then go to the first approval stage so the outcome of course comes from a task once again if it's not then go to reject the announcement there's my work flow without any errors so that's great I can go ahead and publish it out which as you know it's going to go to the announcement list another thing that I can do is go to work those settings and change some settings here and I'm going to go ahead and have it so the workflow starts automatically when item is created and then I republish the workflow now I'm going to go to the browser and then to that announcement list specifically worsening to go to the correct site then go to the announcements list and then here need to make a new announcement I'm signed in as myself Asif Romani and the new announcement here is about the cafeteria menu I'm going to be serving all veggie items ok so that's a new announcement correct that I created all right here it is it says the workflow starting assigned to Garth Forge perfect so if I go to a different window now where Garth support is the one who signed in I'm gonna look at his inbox to see that if he actually got that approval announcement email there's other emails that he has wait for it and here we go here's a new announcement that comes in or the new email saying new tasks assigned by Asif romani to approve the announcement when he clicks on it he gets to the announcement or to the task specifically and then he can click on edit to edit the task and either approve or reject this particular task for this particular announcement in this case we'll go to prove it so a task is done going back now let's see what the history says here so starting now it says completed and approved for the task now if i refresh again the whole workflow has been approved going back to the announcements list same thing workflow has been approved the announcement has been approved I mean now back in SharePoint designer if I go to edit the workflow and click on the views button you see what happens it's actually making the shapes stencils and everything else to show me our different view of this workflow before of course currently I was seeing the code view or the configuration view now I wanna see the visual view so here it is completely configurable here as well that's my Visio diagram of the workflow

Channel: VisualSP

Views: 30,047

Rating: 4.9459457 out of 5

Keywords: sharepoint workflows

Id: 0cgs-7APLJ0

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 23 2012