The Value of Human Workow
Businesses depend on business processes. While those processes often involve
software, the most important processes in many organizations depend on people.
Automating interactions among the people who participate in a process can improve how
that process functions, increasing its efficiency and lowering its error rate. Using software
that supports this kind of human workflow can make organizations more effective.
Many kinds of processes in many different kinds of organizations can benefit from
automated support for human workflow. Examples include:
Approval: A common aspect of human-oriented business processes is the need to get
approval from multiple participants. What’s being approved can vary widely, ranging
from a Word document containing next year’s marketing plan to an expense report
from a trip to a conference. In every case, some number of people must review the
information, perhaps appending comments, then indicate approval or rejection.
Coordinating group efforts: Whether it’s preparing a response to an RFP, managing
the translation of a document into one or more languages, or something else, many
processes require people to work together in an organized way. By defining the steps
of the process in an automated workflow, the group’s work can be made more
efficient and the process itself more predictable.
Issue tracking: Many business processes generate a list of outstanding issues. An
automated workflow can be used to maintain that list, assign issues to the people
capable of resolving them, and track the status of that resolution.
To support these kinds of automated business processes, Microsoft Windows SharePoint
Services 3.0 can run human workflow applications. Based on Windows Workflow
Foundation (WF), these applications interact with people through a Web browser and, if
necessary, with other software as well. To create workflow applications, developers use
WF’s Workflow Designer and Visual Studio 2005, while information workers use the new
Office SharePoint Designer.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system, adds
more capability to workflow applications built on Windows SharePoint Services. Using this
product, workflows can use custom forms created with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 to
interact with users through Office applications such as Word 2007 and Outlook 2007.
Office SharePoint Server also includes several pre-defined workflows, letting information
workers create automated business processes for approval and other common situations.
Both Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 will be
standard parts of Windows, while Office SharePoint Server is a separately licensed
product. All of these technologies, together with the tools for creating workflows that use
them, are scheduled to be released around the end of 2006. This paper introduces these
tools and technologies, describing what they do and how they do it. The goal is to provide
a big-picture view of Microsoft’s support for human workflow in Windows SharePoint
Services and the 2007 Office system.
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