WF and WSS (Windows Sharepoint Services) 2003

WF and WSS (Windows Sharepoint Services) 2003

• Nyidalur

  Its all depends upon nature of workflow you want to design , there are couple of things you should consider before making your mind which workflow to use

  Are you only required simple document approval sort of workflow

  Are thier are lot of complex actions involve at every step of workflow (e.g esclations , task delegation ,etc)

  Does your Work Flow Impact major stakeholder of Enterprise or jsut small subset of it

  How you rate the following in contrast to your scnario

  Scalability

  Availability

  Extensibility

  And very important did you need BPM or simple workflow solution , you must make it clear to your self the difference b/w workflow and complete BPM.

  So once you gone through these questions you will be in very good position to made final decision , by the way custom development is better option in terms of cost but its all depends upon your scnario as some organization rank support and other options higer.

  Anyways let me comment on 3rd party selection of workflow I personally work on both K2.NET and Captaris Teamplate 5.0 , the level of integration with .NET products , support all are much better for k2.net and thier is no question that k2.net is superior that captaris (keep in mind you dont want to end up with COM Exceptions and digging into documentation and dont found much ) .

  Hope my answer will help you

  
  
  

• diluted_water

  Thanks JTDSpoons, I will think in all that you have said.

  Regards

  Ignacio

  
  

• asifbawany

  You can use WF with pretty much any current Microsoft technologies -- it's not so much a 'is it possible' so much as it is a 'how much work is it.'

  You might consider hosting WF in a windows service on your host machine that receives messages from a document library event handler. You can also add smart doc capabilities to the documents that communicate with the WF windows service as well.

  
  

• drJekyll

  Razi and everybody, thank you very much for your answers.

  Now, I have to convince my client that this is the best way. But that is another work...

  Regards

  Ignacio

  
  

• Haitham Salah

  Hi Ignacio

  Yes I agree with you , as right now WF is not in position to be used (as its still in beta), and K2.NET is very professional BPM to work with. I higly recommend you uo pitch your requirement on this K2.NET forum so you get much more insight of the product and its capabilities.

  http://forum.k2workflow.com/

  Just for completeness (you might already know that ) as WF can be run with any thingrunning .NET bits so you can always find a way to do this on EPM , infact if you got some time ( i mean to do some sort of cool stuff ) try it and you will be amazed to know how much you can do with it .Couple of months back i done it on the following Microsoft Products (its not as smooth one might think to made these products as hosts but kind of cool thing to do )

  Microsoft SharePoint Server 2003

  Microsoft Content manager Server 2002

  But offcourse right now and couple of month ahead we are not in postion to build and deply workflows based on WF until it got released.

  Good Luck.

  
  
  

• Vin Klassen

  Hi Ignacio

  To address your first question the answer is yes you can use WF with WSS , the real question you may want to ask is "is it feasible to do it at this point of time and take it to my production machine" , well the answer is no , firstly because the WF is still in beta so any kinda official support is out of question at this time . Secondly as the next version of SharePoint V3 will be act as host for Wf any way you will be better off with it (offcourse with other cool stuff ).

  Well to see other side of picture yup I personally do some successfull effort (way back in late semptember last year) of making workflow on top of WSS and find its quit smooth , but building some workflows that you wana deploy on client you should wait till final release.

  Okies to your second question about using other products

  K2.NET is coolest among almost all the other line of .NET complaint workflows and I highly recommend you to atopt it , its integration with SPS is great moreover the IDE for development is also very good. I done some work on other .NET complaint Workflows and find K2.Net quit fit in almost every corner of requirments (by the way thier next version is using Wf itself )

  Feel free to ask if you want to know more ..

  
  
  

• TenShekels

  Hi Ignacio,

  You will be writing some code to use Windows Workflow Foundation with Windows Sharepoint Services V2 (2003). The next version of WSS (2007) has the workflow runtime built into it so workflows are enabled on document libraries out of the box.

  More info here and here.

  Cheers,
  Paul

  
  
  

• Joel Pobar

  Hi Razi,

  Thanks for your answer.

  I have to integrate many document’s workflows with a EPM solution (Enterprise Project Management), so it is’nt a simple document approval workflow, I have roles, task delegation, etc.

  I don’t have in mind to use Captaris. I will use WF or K2.NET, and by the moment, to work with WSS 2003, I think the best option is K2.NET.

  Are you agree with me

  Regards

  Ignacio

  
  

• AlexU

  Thanks to everybody,

  So the answer to my question is yes. I can use WF with WSS 2003.

  I thought the answer was "no". I read this, wrote by Dennis Pilarinos:

  http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx PostID=89654&SiteID=1

  But the next question is, If i have to value the effort to code my workflows using WF with WSS 2003, and the prices of licences of K2.NET, which is the best choice

  By the moment, I think the best option is use K2.NET, but i have to think in costs too.

  Regards

  Ignacio

  
  

• logogamer

  This really depends on

  1) how complex the problem is and

  2) how capable\comfortable you are with .NET, SharePoint, and WF.

  For a simple document approval workflow, K2 may be overkill. If it is more complicated and you have no in house resources, K2 might might be the better choice.

  There are also other options, including Captaris Workflow, for example, or outsourcing the custom development, which for a simpler workflow might actually be cheaper than K2.

  It also depends on how much more workflow you will need once people see how nice the document approval is. There tends to be a high 'we got to get us some of that' factor when workflow first starts propagating through an organization.

  
  
• WF and WSS (Windows Sharepoint Services) 2003