Find Your Best Option for Creating Workflows

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Workflows are core to business functions, and a key component of an enterprise-class collaboration platform is the ability to automate workflows. In the new edition of TechNet ON, we examine to various tools and procedures for building workflows in SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010 offers several ways to create workflows, including ways for your users to build workflows without writing code. And TechNet has launched a new Resource Center, Workflows in SharePoint Server 2010, which does a great job of explaining the various workflow authoring tools, including the use of InfoPath forms services, SharePoint Designer 2010, and Visual Studio 2010 to create code-based custom workflows.

You also can use Visio Premium 2010 as a starting point to create SharePoint workflows since flowcharts are great way to model workflows. As Brien Posey points out in his TechNet Magazine article SharePoint 2010: Going with the Flow, Visio 2010 can be used to create a workflow template that you can then import into SharePoint Designer to complete the build, without having to write any code. Posey takes you through the steps in this process, including the use of SharePoint Designer.

While SharePoint workflows are designed to improve the performance of business processes, you’ll also be monitoring the performance of your SharePoint site and there is one key element that can contribute to sluggish performance: the database.

As more users and more documents get added to a SharePoint site and need to go back and forth between the SharePoint Web farm and the SQL Server database, the database can quickly overload and slow down SharePoint 2010. In this edition of TechNet ON, Iqbal Khan provides a solution to this problem in his TechNet Magazine article Improve SharePoint 2010 Performance with RBS.

Khan’s article is a must-read for SharePoint administrators looking to elevate the performance of SharePoint 2010. While SharePoint 2010 supports binary large objects (BLOBs), it’s not the best place to store BLOB data, so with SQL Server 2008, Microsoft added the Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) feature which lets SQL Server store all the BLOB data outside the database.

More to come,

Mitch

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