The Best SharePoint Features for SharePoint Workflows

Experts have been digging into SharePoint for a long time, and there are mutual consent and appreciation prevails among the experts that the SharePoint has matured drastically as a platform. With advanced SharePoint features, gone are the days, when you have to develop custom ‘Web Parts’ or required access to ‘Special Folders’, to attain any additional functionality. SharePoint now offers various workflow capabilities and features that are new and better. SharePoint workflow has significantly changed from the former versions. In this blog post, we are providing you a brief overview of the best feature of SharePoint workflows that we find most exciting and useful. But before getting into it, let’s have a brief overview of the workflows itself so that someone new to the SharePoint gets equal information and knowledge from our article. 

What Does ‘Workflows’ Mean?

In SharePoint, the term ‘Workflows’ is referred to a series of jobs or a single job or tasks that complete/perform a certain, defined action. Workflows can be triggered manually, or in response to a list event or site. SharePoint Workflows are exclusively helpful in automating a repetitive manual work process or any existing conceptual task. This may sound simple and non-powerful, but trust us! SharePoint Workflows are amazingly powerful to overcome your manual work processes. For example, an ‘Approval Process’ may include several time-intensive steps, including content changing, sending a request to multiple designated authorities for approval, and then activates publishing. However, in SharePoint, ‘Approval Workflow’ is the most common and praise one; and it works as follow;

• Someone making the change to a particular Content Item. 
• The approval workflow gets triggered once published or saved. 
• The approval workflow in SharePoint notifies the designated approver automatically about the item that is awaiting approval.
• As soon as the content is approved by the approver, it gets published for live use. 

Some of the most amazing features available for SharePoint Workflows include the following; 

• Web Services

Yes, you read right! All the SharePoint version ahead of 2013, allows web services to be directly accessed from a workflow. This allows the integration of disparate data systems while offering centralized data management. For instance, now you easily pull data from a third-party or external website that is presently not running on your internal SharePoint portal. You can also easily work with this data while using your intranet SharePoint site. Once finished, you can publish it back to the external site through a few easy steps. You can also make changes and updates in your SharePoint contact list and can populate them into your CRM system. 

• Loops

Loops is another very strong feature of SharePoint workflows. You can design the workflows of your choice, simply by running a set of desired actions in a specific number of times or until your required condition is met. This feature has become extremely useful, with the ability to set variables. For instance, if you want to delete all the documents in a document library that are approved by all the user; you can set up a loop to open each folder in every library. You can then set up another loop to look through every file within the current folder. By looking into the document properties of every file, you could easily determine whether to delete or keep the particular file. 

• Stages

There are mainly two purposes that are served by ‘Stages’ which include the following;

• To visually organize a related set of tasks or actions. 

• To control the program flow. 

Using advanced SharePoint features, you can organize your tasks into distinct ‘Functions’; and then they can be called from other stages. For instance, you could develop a personalized workflow that sends an email to all the customers and employees at the same time. However, the data or information included within the email would be different in each email. For that purpose, you can set up a workflow containing two different stages;

• SendEmployeeEmail.
• SendCustomerEmail.

Then, by using the handy loop on the chosen list of recipients, you could implement an ‘IF’ statement to check whether the contact is a customer or employee. If the contact is customer, I will use the ‘Go-To’ special workflow command, and tell the workflow to SendCustomerEmail, otherwise, it will be told to ‘Go To SendEmployeeEmail’.

• Visual Designer

There are several ways that you may use to create SharePoint Workflows. Formerly, text-based workflows used to be created by typing or adding data from a defined list of actions and conditions. However, the latest SharePoint version i.e. SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint 2019 allows you to develop workflows by using ‘Visio’; simply dragging the shapes onto the drawing and by settings some properties. An additional benefit of this feature is for the visual learners who are good at understanding through diagrams; because this saves much of time, as you don’t need to get much into reading. 

• Pausing

The pausing feature allows a workflow to stop the execution for a certain duration. This feature allows you to stop the execution for a minute, an hour a day, or pause until a particular date. For instance, I have a workflow which has found broken site links and then sends an email. You can then program it to call another workflow, which is purposely defined to wait for one week before calling the first workflow again, thus generating a monthly/weekly email. By doing so, we can have a simplified scheduled SharePoint task. 

These are only a few features that we find the best for the SharePoint Workflow; However, there are a lot of them that can be further explored. All you need is to learn with time and endeavor for customization which helps you attain the optimal productivity and performance level.