SharePoint Saturday, speaking on workflow

It has been so busy it's about time I've reported this! I'm giving a talk at SharePoint Saturday in Ann Arbor on 3/13. The talk will be the SharePoint 2010 Workflow Smackdown. We'll be taking a look at SharePoint Designer 2010 & see if it's a contender for building workflows, compared to Visual Studio 2010.

As a developer, my first inclination is to go to the 'real thing', crack open Visual Studio and build out a new workflow project. But if my administrator won't let me deploy custom code, then what? In the 2007 days it would be worth the battle; we could create workflows in SPD 2007 but seemed it was always one action short of what I needed.

So can SPD 2010 help out? In short, yes! It has a lot more capability for workflow development, but I think more importantly it is a tool a (knowledgable) end user could use. Especially with Visio 2010 as the workflow designer tool, never did like trying to lay out the workflow in SPD 2007, wasn't visual enough.

Of course, that does mean that user needs Visio 2010, and SPD 2010. SPD 2010 will still be free, but Visio of course is licensed.

Now, if your environment lets you deploy custom code, and you know your way around .Net development, should you even bother with SPD? Good question. I'd have to vote it is worth considering, from a maintenance standpoint. One of the things us developers always do (me too!) is to create some great crazy code, deploy it, it works, great, and we move on. But then down the road darn that thing, it's having a problem. With SPD, because it is declarative, debugging and/or modifying is easier...in fact you could even get that power user to take over! So it is something to consider.

With that - here's the link to the presentation: SharePoint Saturday Workflow Smackdown

Note that if you want to play around with workflows, I recommend making sure you've first enabled the User Profile Import Service - without it, if you assign a workflow item & wait for the approval to kick in, you'll get a nice REJECTED instead. No email address. I also use SMPT4DEV to test the email messages - much easier than standing up Exchange! It's really handy.