WORKFLOWS & FORMS DEPLOYMENT. presented by

Transcription

1 WORKFLOWS & FORMS DEPLOYMENT presented by

2 Table of Contents Introduction What Are Workflows What s Nintex? And The Question Is The Current Process The Risks of This Process Is It Better With Nintex & Sharegate? Streamlined Process with Nintex & Sharegate About Sharegate

3 Introduction I m sure many of you will agree when we say SharePoint is a very large and capable platform, with a wide range of features and functions. From security and governance to document management, Intranets, social and web content management, Its capabilities are huge, almost limitless. In this ebook, we will take a look at one of those features in particular - Workflows and Forms. 3

4 What are Workflows, and Why Would You Need Them? Every company, no matter their size, uses some kind of workflow or business process automation to improve productivity. Think of a new employee joining the company; he needs a desk, an account, an introduction, fire safety training, maybe even business cards to be created and printed. Let s take another example - document approval in its simplest form. An editor creates a document, submits it to his manager for review, and it's published afterwards. Two common examples for many organizations, these workflows can be both complex and simple. SharePoint offers some rich workflow features, but there are certainly some gaps. For example, communication with line-of-business systems usually involves custom development, and the workflow designer in SharePoint Designer has several quirks that limit its usefulness. 4

5 What s Nintex? Yes, SharePoint has its limits, and it's a good thing to know them. Thankfully, as it's often the case, the Microsoft Partner Network have stepped in to solve the problem. In this case, it's Nintex with their highly popular Nintex Workflows and Forms products. For those not au fait with Nintex, their tools allow business users to create awesome workflows and forms without any kind of customization. In the case of onboarding a new employee, Nintex is able to automatically create Active Directory accounts, which would ordinarily involve heavy and complex custom development. The Nintex visual designer allows business users to build powerful tools fitting their specific needs with ease. 5

6 And the Question Is: Why create a workflow in a development environment instead of doing it straight into production? When complex workflows must be developed, it s good practice to do so in a separate development environment. A developer can create the workflow there, without interrupting business as usual. It would be risky to do this in a production environment as this may break other things, resulting in a poor experience for end users and even loss of time and money as people cannot get on with their jobs, not to mention potential data losses. Once the developer is done with the creation, a tester can then try this workflow before it's deployed to a staged environment for a business user to test further. This testing process may be complex, especially if the workflow or form integrates with line-of-business systems. Only once it has passed all tests should the workflow be moved to a l i v e s y s t e m, o r p r o d u c t i o n environment as it's often called. If the solution uses an Out of the box SharePoint workflow it's very difficult to move it between environments, and maintain all of the data and audit information needed. 6

7 The Current Process of Creating and Copying Workflows Between Environments Let s assume the tool you use to create and develop workflows is SharePoint Designer. The process to copy an out-ofthe-box SharePoint workflow between environments from development, to staging, to production, will normally look like the following: 1. A developer creates the workflow in a development environment 2. A QA developer examines the workflow in this environment 3. If it is approved, the workflow is recreated in a staging environment 4. The developer and tester both test the workflow in the staging environment 5. A business user then tests the workflow in staging. If any issue is found (which is likely), the process starts again from the beginning 6. If the business user is happy, the workflow is recreated in production 7. Developer, tester, and business user test the workflow in production 7

8 The Risks of This Process As you can see, there are a lot of manual steps involved. There s some obvious disadvantages; even with very highly skilled people, errors will inevitably be made. Besides that, the process is repetitive work. If you re striving for efficiency, this wouldn t score particularly highly. Visual Studio does allow packaging workflows as a template, to help and enable deployment across environments. The downside is that it's for very advanced users only. Click below to read the TechNet article on the differences between developing workflows in SharePoint Designer vs Visual Studio. LEARN MORE ABOUT THE DIFFERENCES 8

9 Is it better with Nintex & Sharegate? In short, yes. Nintex Workflows can now be created in a development environment, and then copied automatically to staging using Sharegate. There's no room for error here, the workflow is duplicated to the destination environment. The same is true for promoting to production. This process allows developers to easily fix issues in workflows that were created directly in production. Instead of trying to fix the issues in production, the workflow can be copied to a development environment first. You can then make all the changes you want to find the problem, without interrupting the workflow on production. Every company has workflows. Automating them using SharePoint workflows will bring efficiency and is less prone to errors than manual processes. While out-of-the-box workflows in SharePoint are quite rich, in most cases, you'll find that they're lacking features. Nintex is an awesome add-on for SharePoint to create advanced workflows without any technical knowledge or custom development. But they need to be put together using the right process, with proper testing. This involves multiple environments and systems. Our relationship with Nintex now means we can help take the pain out of this process to let you focus on improving your productivity. 9

10 Streamlined Process with Nintex & Sharegate With Nintex & Sharegate, no need to spend long hours recreating Workflows, worrying about quality issues, asking different parties for their input at different stages of development. Nintex' Workflow Designer is intuitive and easy to use while Sharegate moves things through simple drag & drops. 1. Create or edit the workflow Combine the two, and you get a three main steps to this process. You create/edit the workflow, test it and deploy it. That s it! 2. Test the workflow As easy as 1, 2, 3. Repeat these steps for any given environment and you got yourself a simple solution to your workflow migration mayhem. Since you copy a proven workflow instead of rebuilding the whole thing, you get the insurance everything works at destination. Now that's smooth sailing! 3. If it is approved, it s deployed DEPLOY MY WORKFLOWS & FORMS NOW 10

11 We are Sharegate was born in 2011 from the observation that the available SharePoint tools were way to complicated to use, thus distracting users from improving their business proficiency. We have built a simple to use, yet extremely powerful Management tool for SharePoint, Office 365 and OneDrive for Business. We believe life should be Just Damn Simple, dealing with SharePoint included. We aim to be your SharePoint & Office 365 Management one-stop-app. Migrate anything from workflows to multiple Site Collections from a farm or version to another can be done with a single drag & drop. Run reports to ensure your company data are safe and identify potential threats. Manage your content to guarantee the compliance of your entire environments with bulk edition, metadata preservation, and much more! Sleep tight at night, using Sharegate. 11

12 Your #1 Tool to Simplify SharePoint & Office 365 Management Deploy Your Nintex Workflows and Forms START MY FREE 15-DAY TRIAL NOW? Navigation Sites Lists and Libraries Portal Name Address Select All Sharegate Team Site Name Type Content Types Site Collections (51) Current site Site Columns Users Groups Permission Levels Adam Alexandre Antoine Bdoyon Carl Charles Chris Copy Sharegate Team Site Subsites (3) departments MyTeamSite NintexWorkflows Workflows Demo 2013 Dev Managed Metadata 51 items 4 items