Workflow Introduction

The core of any business is the business process. People interact with each other to make up these processes. Traditionally these processes require people to request or provide information manually to one another. When this information is stored in SharePoint, you may use workflows to do this for you automatically. The workflows help the processes to be more effective and reduce the risk of breaches.

SharePoint 2010 provides following out of the box workflow ready to use.

• Approval – If you have a document or other content which needs to go through single level approval process then this workflow can be used. It routes the content for approval. Approvers can then approve or reject the document, reassign the approval task, or request changes to the document.
• Collect Feedback – If you just need to collect feedback on the content, go with this workflow. This routes a document for review. Then the reviewers can provide feedback, which is compiled and sent to the document owner when the workflow has completed.
• Collect Signatures – This workflow assigns tasks to users requesting digital signatures be added to a Microsoft Office file.
• Disposition Approval – Using this workflow you can manages document expiration and retention by allowing participants to decide whether to retain or delete expired documents.
• Three State - This workflow allows items to move between three states, which are specified by the workflow designer. These could be "Pending", "Approved", and "Rejected", or "Not Started", "In Progress" and "Resolved". This is the only workflow template available in SharePoint Foundation.  This workflow is the most complex one available out of the box. You can use this workflow in various scenarios which requires condition based action.
• Publishing Approval – This workflow is similar to the standard Approval workflow, but it is geared towards publishing pages instead of standard documents.

You can find the workflow setting option in the list/library ribbon.

 

If your processes can not be implemented using one of these workflows, you can try to implement it using SharePoint designer 2010.

For more coding flexibility, you can use Visual studio to code and develop a workflow.

Visio can also be used to design SharePoint workflows.

Please check the other articles on workflow for more information on these options.

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