Professional Workflow in SharePoint 2010 No. 4 : Real World Business Workflow Solutions

This topic is a core need for the SharePoint community because the community is lacking guidance on how to build business solutions using the platform and this will only become more difficult with SharePoint 2010. Today, organizations have a fairly solid understanding of SharePoint document management features, or search or metadata management and other core platform features generally in isolation of each other. However, organizations struggle to provide real and cohesive business solutions using the platform even though all the components are there to do it. The introduction of yet more and expanded functionality within the SharePoint 2010 platform will only add complexity to this problem. As SharePoint continues exponential growth within the enterprise and beyond, the SharePoint community will continue to struggle to gain a better understanding of these issues, as evidenced by the fast growing online community and the explosion of SharePoint related conferences (e.g. "SharePoint Saturday" events taking place all over the country "Best Practices" conferences taking place in the U.S. and Europe, not to mention a wide array of Microsoft-sponsored events).Abbreviated TOC: Introduction: Describes what the book is about, why the reader should buy it, what we promise to deliver to them over the course of the book. New Features: What's new in SP 2010 with an eye toward the kinds of business solutions that were hard or impossible to solve with earlier versions of SharePoint. Systems Design for Power Users: Many of our readers are not classically trained IT professionals. This chapter provides the ground work for these readers to understand the basics of proper systems analysis, requirements gathering and design, always related to SharePoint 2010. Business scenario: Conference room scheduling: Use SP 2010 to implement a comprehensive conference room scheduling solution for a multi-site, multi-national company. Business scenario: Expense entry and approval. Business scenario: IT change request Business scenario: Marketing Materials Approval. This is a more advanced scenario that involves actors both within and without the organization. Business scenario: Sales pipeline management. This scenario will address reporting and escalation. Business scenario: Create and manage RFPs. Business scenario: Hire-to-retire process. Manage looking for new hire (managing resumes), managing job openings, managing on-boarding of new hire, managing job transfers and managing separation (termination, retirement, etc). This is a big chapter that may turn into 2 chapters. Technical scenario: There's a common template in SharePoint 2007 that is widely used ("training and scheduling"). This chapter describes how to upgrade that template to SharePoint 2010 and extend it with some common sense new features. Advanced topics: Creating custom activities in SharePoint designer. This chapter may extend to two chapters.

Paul J. Galvin is a SharePoint solutions architect with BrightStarr, a SharePoint consulting firm providing consulting services to clients worldwide. He is a four-time Microsoft SharePoint MVP.

Udayakumar Ethirajulu is a Microsoft SharePoint MVP, frequent blogger, and public speaker at SharePoint events. Uday works at RSC Solutions as Vice President & Chief Architect in New York.